Spotify for Business

There is no Spotify for Business.

Spotify doesn't sell a commercial tier. The account playing in your store right now is a personal license — which makes it a legal problem with three honest fixes. Here they are, priced.

The short version: Spotify does not offer a business or commercial tier in the United States. Spotify's Terms of Use license every account — including Premium and Family — for personal, non-commercial use only. Playing it in a store, restaurant, gym, or office is a public performance under U.S. copyright law, and the licenses that cover public performance aren't included in any consumer subscription, at any price.

Why there's no business tier

The royalty math doesn't allow one.

Consumer streaming royalties are negotiated for one listener in a private setting. A store with two hundred customers walking through per day sits outside that math entirely. In the U.S., music played in a commercial space needs public performance licenses administered by the four major performing rights organizations — ASCAP, BMI, SESAC, and GMR. Your Premium subscription — whatever Spotify charges this year — doesn't buy any of them. Paying somebody for music is not the same as paying the right somebody.

This isn't a gray area Spotify forgot to close. It's Section 3 of their Terms of Use, in plain language. Apple Music, Amazon Music, and YouTube Music all carry the same restriction.

$750–$30,000

Statutory damages per song for infringement — up to $150,000 per song if a court finds it willful. A forty-song rotation is forty separate violations.

U.S. Copyright Act, 17 U.S.C. § 504(c) · Most real-world outcomes settle from a few thousand dollars to low five figures — what enforcement actually looks like

The legal paths

Three ways to fix it — and what each honestly costs.

Rent a licensed catalog

from roughly $20 / month

Services like Soundtrack Your Brand and SoundMachine bundle the PRO licenses into a subscription and feel the most like Spotify — some are built around importing the playlists you already use. Credit where it's due: if "the same songs, legally" is the whole goal, this works. The trade: you're renting the same shared catalog your competitors stream, and the billing can multiply inside a single location as you add areas and speakers.

License the PROs directly

$1,000s / year, per location

You can buy public performance licenses straight from ASCAP, BMI, SESAC, and GMR. You'd need all four to safely cover a streaming catalog, each priced separately by venue size and use. This mostly makes sense for live music, DJs, and special cases — not for an owner-operator who just wants the floor covered. Run your numbers.

Play music nobody has to license

Free — $0 / location

Entuned composes and owns every track outright, so there's no PRO obligation passed to you at all — indemnified the moment it plays. The music isn't a catalog made for radio; it's engineered for your store's customer and tied to outcomes like dwell time and conversion. Entuned Free has no card, no trial timer, no expiry — it's the legal fix on its own. Paid tiers ($99–$399/mo) add deeper customization and measurement when you want them.

The part nobody tells you

Legality is the smaller problem.

Every option above makes you legal. Only one asks what the music is for. Spotify's catalog — and every licensed copy of it — was produced to hold a listener's attention on headphones, not to move a customer through a floor. Forty years of retail research says tempo, key, and energy measurably shift dwell time, spend, and willingness to pay. If you're fixing the licensing anyway, it's worth fixing the strategy in the same move. That's the case we make in How Music Affects Retail.

Common questions

Spotify in a business, answered straight

Does Spotify for Business exist?
No. Spotify does not sell a business, commercial, or venue tier in the United States. Every Spotify plan — Free, Premium, Family, Duo — is licensed for personal, non-commercial use only under their Terms of Use.
Can I play Spotify in my store if I pay for Premium?
No. Price isn't the issue — license scope is. Premium removes ads for personal listening; it doesn't add the public performance rights a commercial space requires. The same applies to Apple Music, Amazon Music, and YouTube Music. Check your store's exposure.
What are the fines for playing Spotify in a business?
Statutory damages under 17 U.S.C. § 504(c) run $750 to $30,000 per song, up to $150,000 per song for willful infringement. In practice most cases settle after a PRO demand letter, typically from a few thousand dollars to low five figures — still many years of what a legal option costs.
Is Soundtrack Your Brand the same as Spotify for Business?
It's the closest thing on the market — and the history helps explain the confusion: it launched as a Spotify-backed venture marketed as "Spotify Business" before becoming the independent Soundtrack Your Brand. Today it's a legitimate fix for "the same songs, legally." It's still a shared catalog rented per month, which is a different product than music engineered for your specific store.
How is Entuned legal without ASCAP or BMI licenses?
PRO licenses exist to pay third-party rights holders. Entuned composes and owns its music outright, so for audio Entuned delivers there are no third-party performance rights to license — and we indemnify the operator on top of it. Details on the licensing page.
Nobody's caught us in five years. Why change now?
Enforcement is uneven, but it's real and it's per-song, with exposure accumulating the entire time the speakers are on. Most operators fix it as soon as they learn how the licensing actually works — usually because the fix costs less than the worry. The free path costs nothing at all.
Isn't my store too small to need a license?
There's a real small-establishment exemption in U.S. copyright law (17 U.S.C. § 110(5)(B)), and it's worth knowing what it actually covers: over-the-air radio and TV broadcasts, in stores under certain square-footage and speaker limits. It has never covered streaming services. A small store playing Spotify is not exempt. Check whether your setup qualifies for anything.

Fix the license. Upgrade the strategy.

Entuned Free — no credit card, no time limit. Original music engineered for your customer and your store, owned outright and indemnified the moment it plays.

Start Free
Keep reading: Spotify business risk check · Is it actually illegal to use Spotify in my store? · Licensing & PRO coverage · Retail music FAQ