Free and Legal Music for Retail Stores: Every Option for Playing Music Without PRO Fees

In part one of this series, we covered why playing a personal Spotify account in your retail store is a copyright infringement that can carry fines of $750 to $150,000 per song. In part two, we looked at what that risk means for commercial landlords and property managers whose retail tenants are almost certainly playing unlicensed music right now.

This post covers what to actually do about it. Every option, from fully licensed commercial services to free alternatives that eliminate PRO licensing fees entirely.

The most straightforward path to music licensing compliance is buying blanket licenses directly from ASCAP, BMI, SESAC, and GMR. A blanket license from each PRO gives your store permission to play any song in that PRO’s catalog.

The cost varies by venue size, occupancy, and type of music use. For a small retail store, a single PRO license might start around $250 to $400 per year. Since each PRO represents a different set of songwriters and you’d need coverage from at least ASCAP and BMI to cover most popular music, total annual costs typically run $500 to $1,500 for a small retail location.

The advantage is flexibility. With blanket licenses in place, you can play whatever you want from whatever source you want. The Spotify terms of service still technically prohibit commercial use, but the copyright exposure from playing songs publicly is covered by the PRO licenses.

The disadvantage is administration. You’re managing relationships with multiple PROs, each with different rate structures, renewal timelines, and reporting requirements. And if you miss a renewal or let a license lapse, you’re back to being noncompliant. The Meadowlark Bar in Denver had ASCAP licenses starting in 2010, stopped paying in 2015, and got sued for $27,000 in 2019.

Several companies offer music streaming services designed specifically for business use. These services bundle PRO licensing into their subscription fees, so the business owner doesn’t have to manage multiple license relationships directly.

These services handle licensing paperwork on your behalf and provide curated playlists, scheduling tools, and content screened for appropriateness. For a store owner who just wants music playing without worrying about compliance, a commercial streaming service is probably the easiest path. The annual cost runs roughly $200 to $960 per location depending on the service and plan.

The tradeoff is that you’re paying a monthly subscription for something that feels like it should be free. And the music selection, while large, is still a licensed catalog — you’re choosing from what’s available, not creating something specific to your store or brand.

Music in the public domain or offered under royalty-free licenses can be played in a retail store without PRO fees. Public domain works include compositions published before 1929. Royalty-free music libraries sell or offer tracks that come with a one-time license for commercial use.

Several online platforms offer royalty-free music libraries: Epidemic Sound, Artlist, AudioJungle, and others. Quality varies widely. Some tracks sound fine as background music. Many sound like what they are, which is stock music. A 2016 study by SACEM found that 64% of customers rated royalty-free music as lower quality and found it annoying to listen to. Whether that matters depends on how much your store’s atmosphere relies on music.

The advantage is that you pay once (or subscribe at a low monthly rate) and the licensing is settled. The disadvantage is that the music often sounds generic, and you’re still spending time finding and managing playlists.

This is what we do at Entuned, so take our perspective here with the appropriate grain of salt.

Entuned composes original music designed specifically for retail environments. Because we own the compositions and recordings, there are no PRO fees, no licensing requirements, and no compliance risk. The music is built from the ground up for commercial spaces — every sonic decision is intentional, from tempo and key to production texture and lyric content.

Entuned Free is a no-cost tier that gives any retail store access to fully licensed, original music with no subscription fee and no PRO exposure. We built it because we think the licensing problem in retail is absurd, and because the store owners who need it most are the ones who can least afford another monthly subscription.

We’re not a catalog service. We don’t license existing songs. The music is composed and produced specifically for the behavioral context of a retail environment, which means it’s designed to affect how customers feel and behave in a store, not just fill silence. If you just need something legal and inoffensive playing in the background, several of the options above will work fine. If you want music that’s doing more than that, this is a different product.

This is technically an option. Some stores operate in silence or with only ambient sound, and there’s nothing illegal about that.

But most retailers play music for a reason. Research on music’s effect on consumer behavior consistently shows that the right music increases dwell time, affects purchase decisions, and shapes how customers perceive a store. A 1982 study by Ronald Milliman found that slower tempo music in supermarkets increased shopping time by 38% and sales volume by 29%. More recent research has confirmed similar effects across retail environments. Silence is compliant, but it’s also leaving something on the table.

If you manage commercial retail properties, you’re in a position to help your tenants navigate this without it costing you anything. A simple reference document in your tenant welcome packet — covering the basics of music licensing requirements and listing the available options — accomplishes two things. It protects your tenants from an enforcement action they didn’t see coming. And it protects you from the vacancy that follows when a small retailer gets hit with a five-figure demand they can’t absorb.

This isn’t a sales pitch. If your tenants buy blanket licenses from ASCAP and BMI, that works. If they sign up for Soundtrack Your Brand or CloudCover, that works. If they use Entuned Free, that also works. The point is that they do something, because right now most of them are doing nothing, and the cost of that lands on both of you.

For the full picture of what the landlord risk actually looks like, see part two of this series.