The short answer is no. Spotify, Apple Music, YouTube Music and Amazon Music are consumer services, licensed for personal use only. The moment a song plays in a room open to the public, a different set of rules applies — and in the United Kingdom those rules are enforced by PRS for Music and PPL, usually through their joint product TheMusicLicence. This is not a grey area. It is written in the terms of service you accepted when you signed up.
No credit card required for the trial. Cancel anytime. Direct licence certificate included, valid in the UK under Directive 2014/26/EU on collective management of copyright.
Most small café owners only discover this after a PRS or PPL inspector walks in. The clause has been in the Spotify contract from day one. No one reads it, but it is binding the moment the account is created.
The Spotify Terms and Conditions of Use, accepted by every user at signup, state clearly that the service is provided "for your personal, non-commercial use only". The same restriction appears in the Apple Music Terms of Service, the YouTube Music subscription agreement and the Amazon Music terms. This language is not marketing copy. It is the legal foundation on which the consumer licence is built. It is the reason Spotify can offer 100 million songs for £11.99 per month: the price reflects a personal licence, not a public performance licence.
A coffee shop is, by definition, open to the public. The music heard by customers ordering a flat white, working on a laptop or waiting for a takeaway is a public performance of recorded music, and in the United Kingdom public performance is regulated under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. The Spotify subscription does not transfer with the music to the room. It stays with the individual account holder, in private. PRS for Music and PPL hold the right to enforce public performance on behalf of the songwriters, publishers, performers and record labels they represent.
Some café owners assume that paying for Premium is enough. It is not. Premium removes ads and unlocks offline listening, but it does not change the nature of the licence. Others assume that a small volume, or a back-of-house setup, solves the problem. It does not. The legal test is whether customers can hear the music. If they can, a public performance is taking place, and a proper licence is required — either a PRS+PPL licence through TheMusicLicence, or a direct licence from a rightsholder such as My Corporate Radio.
Since 2018, PRS for Music and PPL have administered UK public performance licences jointly through a product called TheMusicLicence. One application, one bill, both rights covered. Here is what a small independent café can expect to pay.
For a café under 400 square feet with music from a single source (Spotify-style streaming) and occasional radio or television, TheMusicLicence combined PRS+PPL fee typically falls between £300 and £600 per year. The fee scales up with floor area, number of staff, additional media (live music, DJ nights, TV sports) and whether the venue serves alcohol late.
This is the licence cost. It does not include the cost of the music source itself, which must still be a legitimately licensed commercial service — not a consumer Spotify or Apple Music subscription.
Both PRS for Music and PPL run regular inspections across London, Manchester, Edinburgh, Bristol, Birmingham and other major UK markets, and first-time fines for unlicensed public performance typically start at several hundred pounds on top of the backdated licence.
Figures are indicative ranges published by PRS for Music and PPL for small independent hospitality venues. Request a precise quote directly from themusiclicence.co.uk for your exact venue size and usage.
Music in a café is not background noise. Forty years of academic research in consumer psychology have documented a clear, measurable effect of music on how long customers stay and how much they spend. Several of the studies were conducted in British venues.
Ronald E. Milliman (1986), published in the Journal of Consumer Research, ran the first systematic experiment on the effect of background music in a hospitality venue. By alternating slow music (under 72 BPM) and fast music (over 94 BPM) in the same restaurant on different days, Milliman observed that customers exposed to slow music spent significantly more at the bar and stayed at their tables longer. The mechanism is called motor entrainment: the human body unconsciously synchronises its rhythms — chewing, walking, gesture — with the external tempo it perceives.
Clare Caldwell & Sally A. Hibbert (2002), published in Psychology & Marketing, replicated the experiment in an Italian restaurant in Glasgow, observing 62 covers across several evenings. Customers exposed to slow music stayed an average of 15.03 minutes longer than those exposed to fast music (t=-2.43, p<.05), with a correlation between music preference and total spend of r=0.45, particularly strong on drinks. The study was conducted under rigorous methodology at the University of Strathclyde.
Adrian C. North, Amber Shilcock & David J. Hargreaves (2003), in Environment and Behavior, tested the effect of music style in an upmarket British restaurant over 18 evenings. With classical music, average spend per cover was significantly higher than with pop or silence, and the effect applied to both starters and main courses. The mechanism is called musical fit: music coherent with the perceived positioning of the venue produces purchase choices coherent with that positioning.
Sources: Milliman (1986), Journal of Consumer Research. Caldwell & Hibbert (2002), Psychology & Marketing 19(11), 895-917. North, Shilcock & Hargreaves (2003), Environment and Behavior.
There is another route, legal and far simpler. Instead of paying PRS and PPL on top of a music service, a UK café can use a catalogue owned and licensed directly by its producer. This removes the PRS+PPL fee entirely on that specific catalogue, because the rightsholder is the same entity that provides the music.
Directive 2014/26/EU on the collective management of copyright, retained into UK law under the EU Withdrawal Act, explicitly recognises that rightsholders are free to license their own works directly to users, bypassing collective management organisations entirely. This principle is the legal foundation of what is known as a direct licence, and it is the mechanism used by My Corporate Radio.
The entire catalogue broadcast through My Corporate Radio is owned outright by the company. The music is AI-crafted under the creative supervision of Emanuele Carocci, an Italian radio broadcaster with over twenty years of experience on national radio, currently co-hosting the morning show on RTL 102.5, the most listened-to national radio station in Italy, Monday to Friday from 9 to 11. No track in the catalogue is registered with PRS for Music or PPL, because My Corporate Radio itself is the rightsholder and the licensor, and holds the right to license the music directly to UK venues.
Every customer receives a written direct licence certificate, issued in the café business name, with explicit references to Directive 2014/26/EU and to EU Regulation 2024/1689 (the AI Act, on transparency of AI-generated works). If a PRS or PPL inspector visits the premises, the certificate is the legal answer. The catalogue sits outside the scope of UK collective management, because under the same framework that governs PRS and PPL, directly licensed works do not need to be inside it.
My Corporate Radio broadcasts five curated stations, each designed for a specific mood and a specific moment in the café day. Weekly updates, no ads, no interruptions.
Light, warm and positive. The right tempo for the morning rush between 7 and 10, when customers want a lift before the day starts. Acoustic pop, sunny soul, soft indie.
Subtle and instrumental. Designed for the hours when customers work on laptops or stay longer with a second coffee. Contemporary jazz, soft electronic, modern classical.
Calm and ambient. For early afternoons, rainy Manchester days, or any moment when the room should slow down. Warm piano, gentle strings, minimalist electronics.
Jazz and lounge, the sound of a well-designed room after 6pm. Ideal for cafés that transition into wine bars or quiet dinner venues.
Higher tempo, brighter dynamics. For busy service moments, takeaway counters and venues that match the pace of a working high street.
Groove and rhythm, for late openings, weekend brunches and special events. Not aggressive, never cheesy. A contemporary party feel that brings energy without forcing the room.
My Corporate Radio does not hide what the catalogue is or how it is produced. Transparency is part of the positioning, not a footnote.
The music broadcast on all five stations is AI-crafted under human creative supervision, using professional licensed tools. The creative direction — the mood of each station, the rotation logic, the weekly updates, the curation standards — is the work of a radio broadcaster with twenty years of experience. The AI is a production tool. The radio professional is the editor.
This model is declared explicitly on every licence certificate, in line with EU Regulation 2024/1689, known as the AI Act, which requires transparency whenever content is generated with artificial intelligence. Some competitors in the background music space use AI quietly, without disclosing it to the customer. My Corporate Radio discloses it from day one.
The advantage for a UK café owner is concrete. A proprietary AI-crafted catalogue has no per-stream royalty owed to external rightsholders, and that cost structure is passed on in the subscription price.
No. Spotify Free, Premium, Family and Student are consumer subscriptions, explicitly restricted to personal, non-commercial use under the Spotify terms of service. A UK café open to the public is a commercial venue, and playing consumer streaming there is both a breach of the Spotify contract and an unlicensed public performance under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, enforced by PRS for Music and PPL.
For most UK cafés yes, because PRS for Music and PPL cover different rights. PRS represents songwriters, composers and music publishers. PPL represents performers and record labels. The two licences are now administered together under TheMusicLicence (a joint PRS+PPL product), which simplifies the process into a single application.
For a typical small independent café, the combined PRS+PPL fee under TheMusicLicence usually ranges between 300 and 600 pounds per year, depending on square footage, music source and whether radio or television is also played on the premises. This fee is on top of any subscription paid to the music service itself.
Yes. The catalogue is proprietary and licensed directly to the customer under the direct licence framework recognised across the UK and the European Union under Directive 2014/26/EU. No PRS for Music or PPL fee applies to this specific catalogue, because neither organisation collects on behalf of tracks that are licensed directly by their rightsholder. The customer receives a written certificate confirming the legal basis of the licence.
Show them the direct licence certificate. It is issued in the café business name and cites the relevant legal framework. That is usually the end of the conversation. No client using My Corporate Radio has ever been fined for unlicensed use of the catalogue.
The international plan is £12.99 per month. Billing is in EUR at the equivalent of £12.99, with the final amount on your card adjusted by your bank's exchange rate. Seven-day free trial, no credit card required, cancel anytime. No setup fee, no contract, no lock-in.
No. A direct licence covers the My Corporate Radio catalogue only. If your café hosts live music, DJ sets with third-party tracks, or plays BBC Radio 1 or commercial radio in the background, you still need a separate PRS+PPL licence for those additional sources. Many of our UK café customers run My Corporate Radio for daytime trade and hold TheMusicLicence only for evening events.
One plan. One price. Five curated stations. Direct licence certificate included. No credit card required for the trial.
For independent coffee shops, cafés, small restaurants, boutique retailers, salons and spas with a single location.
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More about music licensing and sound design for UK hospitality.