A district manager runs 14 stores. She gets a certified letter at her corporate office from BMI. One of the stores, the one in the outdoor lifestyle center in Charlotte, has been playing music without a license on file. The letter lists a settlement number. She forwards it to legal and to the controller. The controller forwards it to her.
Nobody in the chain has ever thought about music licensing. The stores all pay a $17 a month subscription to a well-known streaming service. She assumed that covered it.
What does an ASCAP or BMI letter actually mean? #
In the United States, the right to play a song in public belongs to the songwriter and publisher, not the record label and not the streaming service. Three organizations handle those rights on behalf of the people who wrote the music. ASCAP, BMI, and SESAC. Each one represents a different roster of writers. A store that plays music drawn from all three catalogs needs licenses from all three.
This is true whether the music comes from a CD, a phone plugged into a speaker, a satellite receiver, a streaming service, or the staff’s own Spotify account. The act of playing recorded music in a place open to the public is a public performance under the Copyright Act. A retail store qualifies.
The narrow exemption that comes up in search results is real and almost useless for a chain. Stores under 2,000 square feet playing over-the-air AM or FM radio through no more than six speakers are carved out. Streaming, satellite, CDs, any digital source, not covered.
What it costs when you actually add it up #
ASCAP publishes retail rate cards based on square footage. A 4,000 square foot boutique pays in the low hundreds per year. BMI structures its pricing similarly. SESAC negotiates directly and runs smaller. Three blanket licenses for a single location usually land somewhere between $800 and $2,000 a year, before you pay for the actual music.
Multiply that across a 30-store chain and the number is real. At the same time, most operators never see an invoice, because the commercial music service they pay for already bundles the licenses into the monthly fee. That is the part that matters for the next QBR.
How this shows up in your vendor bill #
Commercial services designed for businesses, the Mood Medias and SiriusXM for Business accounts and the Pandora and Soundtrack Your Brand tiers sold to commercial customers, pay the PROs on behalf of their subscribers and roll the cost into the monthly price. A $25 a month commercial account usually covers the PRO exposure for that location.
Consumer subscriptions do not. A manager who brings her personal Apple Music account to work and hooks it up to the store speakers has moved the store out of compliance, no matter what the brand pays for its official vendor. The Terms of Service on consumer streaming services say this in plain English. Nobody reads the Terms of Service.
The gap that catches operators is vendors who advertise blanket licensing but do not actually cover all three PROs, or who cover them in some regions and not others, or who charge extra for SESAC. An operator who wants to know what they are paying for asks the question in writing and keeps the answer on file.
How enforcement actually works #
ASCAP and BMI field representatives walk into stores and listen. If music is playing and the business has no license on file, the organization sends a letter. The first letter is almost always an offer to buy a retroactive license. The second letter, if the first is ignored, comes from a lawyer. Statutory damages under the Copyright Act run from $750 to $30,000 per song, and willful infringement can go to $150,000.
Enforcement volume has risen with the mall vacancy cycle. The PROs have been walking the same lifestyle centers and Main Streets that multi-location operators run. A store in a high-visibility corridor is more likely to get walked.
What to do this week #
Three things, in order. Pull up your current music vendor contract and find the paragraph that says which public performance licenses are included. If you cannot find that paragraph, email your vendor rep and ask them to confirm in writing that ASCAP, BMI, and SESAC are all covered for every location on the account. Save the email.
Walk into two of your stores at different times of day and listen to what is playing. If a manager has switched from the official vendor to a phone or a personal streaming account, that store is exposed, no matter what the corporate contract says. Write a one-paragraph policy that says staff cannot substitute personal accounts for the approved music source, and have your district managers remind store teams at the next visit.
A new option worth adding to the vendor evaluation at your next renewal. Original music that no PRO represents carries no public performance obligation to begin with. Several commercial services have started offering this. The licensing question drops out of the conversation.
The full picture of how Entuned differs from catalog providers is on the why page.
