In this article
"Can I just play Spotify in here?" is a question almost every restaurant owner asks themselves once, and almost none of them ask the right organisation. Playing music in a venue that's open to the public is tied to two separate fees in every EU country — not one — and most owners have only ever paid one of them.
Somewhere in the first few months after opening, a letter arrives, or an inspector calls, or a fellow owner just mentions it in passing: you owe music rights. Most owners deal with it, pay the amount on the invoice, and consider the matter closed. In reality, they've usually only covered half of it.
The composer/publisher right — the fee owed to whoever wrote and published the song — is the one everyone's heard of, because it's the one the conversation is always about. Sitting next to it is a second, legally entirely separate right for the performer and the record producer: the neighbouring right, sometimes called the "performance right" or, in Belgium, the *billijke vergoeding*. Both are owed the moment you play recorded music publicly in a venue run for profit — a café, a restaurant, a shop.
The problem isn't that owners refuse to pay. It's that almost nobody knows there are two invoices, let alone that they should be receiving both. Some countries now collect both fees through one combined payment — Belgium has done this since 2020 through its Unisono platform. Others, like Germany, keep them as two entirely separate organisations with two entirely separate invoices, and a venue often ends up paying only the first one, for years, without ever knowing the second exists.
This article works out what that actually means: how the fee is built up, what a personal streaming subscription does and doesn't cover, when live music exempts you from the second fee, and what the exposure looks like if a venue is caught unlicensed. The calculator below gives an illustrative estimate based on your own floor area and opening hours — not a replacement for your own country's tariff simulator, but an honest first number.
Why this matters to anyone with a sound system
Music isn't decoration your venue happens to come with — it drives pace, spending and how good the place feels, which is exactly why two separate groups of rights holders both have a legitimate claim on it: whoever wrote the song, and whoever recorded and performed it. The law treats those two contributions as equally protected, and therefore equally owed a fee.
For an owner that's not a legal nuance, it's a bill. A venue that only pays the composer/publisher fee is, on average, paying roughly two-thirds of what it actually owes — the remaining third simply never appears on an invoice they've ever seen, until the day an inspection puts it on the table.
And that day comes more often than owners expect. Collecting societies actively check hospitality venues, precisely because recorded music playing in a venue with the public inside is audible from the street. This article exists to close that gap before an inspection, not after one.
The 7 numbers behind your music licence
Each of these seven numbers is a separate lever that decides what you actually owe — and together they're exactly the model behind the calculator further down.
1. Two organisations, not one
Every EU country has at least two collecting societies with a legitimate claim the moment you play recorded music publicly: one for the composer/publisher right (SABAM in Belgium, GEMA in Germany, SACEM in France, SIAE in Italy, ZAIKS in Poland) and one for the neighbouring right — performer and producer (the *billijke vergoeding* in Belgium, GVL in Germany, SPRE in France).
These aren't two organisations competing for the same fee — they're two legally distinct rights that both happen to arise the moment you play the same track. Paying one never covers the other, even though the first name is usually the only one an owner has ever heard, and gets used as shorthand for "the music licence" as if it were singular.
2. One invoice, or two — it depends where you are
Since January 2020, Belgium collects both fees through one joint platform, Unisono: you register once and get one combined invoice covering SABAM and the *billijke vergoeding*. Germany did the opposite — GEMA and GVL remain two fully separate organisations, each with its own registration, its own tariff and its own annual invoice, so a venue registered only with GEMA has, with certainty, never seen a GVL invoice.
France sits in between: SACEM and SPRE remain two separate rights, administered through one interface. Whatever your own country does, the question that matters is the same one: have you ever seen a separate registration or invoice for the neighbouring right, distinct from your general music-rights fee? If not, there's a real chance you've never paid it.
How three EU countries collect the same two fees — your own country sits somewhere between them.
Whatever your country does, both fees always exist. The only thing that differs is whether you get one invoice for them, or two.
3. €0 — what your personal Spotify account is worth here
A personal Spotify, Apple Music or YouTube subscription is contractually limited to private use. Every major streaming service's terms explicitly exclude public, commercial playback — not because it's technically impossible, but because the subscription you're paying for covers neither of the fees above.
That doesn't mean a personal account gives you "partial" coverage that a licence tops up. It means a private account, played in a venue open to the public, is worth exactly the same as playing no music at all as far as the licences are concerned — except the music is, in fact, audible to whoever's checking.
4. The floor-area tier that sets your base rate
Almost every tariff schedule in the EU starts with the same first question: how large is the space where the music can be heard? A larger floor area means more potential audience, and therefore a higher rate — but almost nowhere linearly. Most schedules use tiers: a higher rate per square metre for the first band, a lower rate for every band after that, because the tenth square metre reaches fewer extra people than the first.
Some countries add a second factor on top: the average price of your most popular dish, as a rough proxy for the venue's commercial scale (a venue charging €16.80 for its main course is assessed differently from a chip shop). The calculator further down uses exactly these two levers: floor area and average main-dish price.
5. The ~45% that's the second invoice
In most EU countries, the neighbouring-rights fee sits somewhere around half of what the composer/publisher fee costs — this article uses an illustrative ratio of 45%, not a claim about any one country's exact statutory figure. For a venue with 90 m² and an average main-dish price of €16.80, that works out to roughly €333 in composer/publisher fees and €150 in neighbouring rights — €482 a year combined.
That's exactly the number most owners have never budgeted for — not because the amount is unreasonable, but because it has never appeared as its own line on a quote or invoice. A venue paying €333 and assuming it's covered is, in this example, missing exactly €150 a year.
For the worked example above: 90 m², an average main-dish price of €16.80.
Both pieces are legally separate fees — neither discounts the other, and neither is optional once you play recorded music publicly.
6. €0 — what live music owes on the neighbouring-rights side
Neighbouring rights arise from a recording — a performer and a producer who made a record together. If you play live music with no recorded backing track (a pianist, an acoustic duo, a Sunday-afternoon trio), there is no recording, and therefore no neighbouring right owed. The composer/publisher fee still applies if the musicians play covers — that right belongs to the song itself, not to any particular recording of it.
That doesn't make live music a loophole, but it is a genuine lever: a venue that books a pianist on Sunday afternoons instead of a playlist drops its neighbouring-rights cost to zero for that slot — whether that's worth it against the cost of the musician is an entirely separate question.
7. The years they can reach back — and the surcharge if they do
A venue that was never registered, found on the day of an inspection, rarely gets billed from that day forward. Most collecting societies can invoice retroactively across several previous years once an unregistered venue is identified — this article uses an illustrative 3 years — usually with a surcharge on top of the standard tariff rather than simply the standard rate applied backwards (used here as 1.5×).
For the example above — €150 a year in missed neighbouring-rights fees — that adds up to a one-off exposure of €673, compared with what registering today would have cost: €150 a year. That gap, not the annual figure itself, is the number the calculator below makes sharpest.
Estimate your own music licence
Enter your own floor area, average main-dish price and opening hours for an illustrative annual estimate, split into the two fees you owe — plus what an inspected, unregistered venue could face retroactively.
This is an illustrative model, not any one organisation's tariff simulator: it uses the same levers (floor area, commercial scale, hours played) that most real schedules use, but the number you get is an estimate, not an invoice. For the exact figure for your venue, this article points you to your own country's tariff simulator — in Belgium, that's Unisono.
What do you actually pay for music in your venue?
Enter your own figures — the tool splits the estimate into the two fees you owe straight away.
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Illustrative model, not any one organisation's tariff simulator. For your venue's exact figure: your own country's tariff simulator (in Belgium, that's Unisono).
The number this produces is deliberately an estimate, not a promise: every country publishes its own, often more detailed tariff structure, with its own bands, discounts for short opening hours and separate rules for terraces. What this model does get right is the shape of the bill — two separate amounts, not one — and the order of magnitude of the risk if you've never paid the second one.
Already know the exact tariff from your own collecting society/ies? Enter that figure under "what you already pay" instead of the default, and the calculator immediately recalculates what the gap — and the exposure — actually means for your venue.
Getting your music licence in order: the plan
There's no grey area to keep sitting in — just a bit of checking most owners put off for years because nobody ever explained it's two fees, not one.
Today
- Check whether your venue is registered with both the composer/publisher society and the neighbouring-rights body in your country, not just the first one.
- Ask exactly what your current invoice covers — the name on it rarely tells you which of the two rights it's for.
This month
- Run your own country's tariff simulator with your real floor area and opening hours for an exact figure, instead of the estimate above.
- Register the missing fee proactively — a voluntary registration costs the standard rate, not a retroactive surcharge.
Ongoing
- Put the annual licence figure into your budget as a fixed cost, next to rent and insurance — not as a surprise that turns up every year.
- For background music, consider a B2B service that already bundles both licences into the subscription price, so you never have to check both registrations yourself again.
The number that matters
Music in your venue isn't a box you tick once and forget — it's two separate, legally independent fees owed every year, and most owners are, structurally, only paying one without realising it.
The gap between those two numbers is rarely what closes a restaurant down. It is, however, the amount that, multiplied by a few years of retroactive billing and a surcharge, turns into a much bigger bill in one go than any owner had budgeted for.
Run it through the calculator above, check with your own collecting society/ies whether you're genuinely registered with both, and put the result next to your rent and your insurance — as a fixed cost you know about, not a risk you catch up on eventually.