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Special Coverage on MUSIC LICENSING By David & Steve Gordon, Sequoia Records
Play Background Music in Your Store for Free Retailers know that music is the not-so-secret ingredient that can enhance their store environment, give customers a more positive experience, invite them to explore, and help to show the products in their best most desirable light. There can be a cost to play background music in your store, for licensing fees charged by performing rights organizations like BMI and ASCAP. You may have heard of retailers being contacted by these organizations and pressured to pay the fees. Or maybe that happened to your store! However – if you know the magic formula – you can play music in your store, legally, without paying that annual fee. Retailing Insight asked us to de-mystify this question, since we’ve been making music that’s sold in stores like yours for decades, and we’re happy to help. So here is our overview of how you can safely play music in your store, without risking obligation for license fees. We do need to say that we are not lawyers, and we are not offering legal advice. We are sharing our understanding of how this works, and what’s worked for us and many of our customers over the years. We’re also including a footnote with the text of the law, plus some articles that go into more depth, if you’re interested in learning more about this. To be even more sure, you could ask for a legal advice from your lawyer to confirm your choices.
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Why Are There License Fees for Playing Background Music in Stores and Other Public Locations? Music compositions and recordings are protected by copyright law. This is the key that allows musicians and composers to make a living. When copies of the music are sold, or used in a film or TV show, or performed in public, the owners of the copyrights earn a fee. Often this is a music publisher or record company and not the artists themselves, but those companies in turn must pay a part of those fees to the musicians and composers. This is of course a general high-altitude view. There are countless ways the payments find their way through the complex system to the composers and musicians, and lots of companies and individuals take a piece of the action along the way. The part of the story that applies to playing music in your store is called the Performance Right. When a song is performed in public, or in your store, or on the radio, and all sorts of other places, that’s a performance – a use of the copyright – so it needs to be authorized by the copyright owner (usually a music publisher). Since the many ways performances happen are so complicated, “Performing Rights Organizations” (like ASCAP, BMI and others) formed to manage the collections of these fees. They keep a percentage and pay the rest to the music publishers, and the music publishers pay a share of that to the composers.
