Music Licensing Around the World
If you operate outside the US, or you're a multi-location group with venues in more than one country, the organizations change, but the underlying obligation doesn't: if you're playing music publicly in a commercial space, you need permission from that country's rights holders, and personal streaming accounts are just as non-compliant there as they are in the US.
The two-rights structure holds everywhere
Wherever you operate, the same basic split applies: one right covers the musical composition (the song itself), and a separate right covers the sound recording (the specific recorded performance). Different organizations often manage each side which is exactly why single-organization coverage is rarely enough, in any country.
United Kingdom. The UK uses two main collecting societies: PRS for Music, representing composers and publishers, and PPL, representing record labels and performers. Since 2018, most UK businesses can license both through a single joint product, TheMusicLicence, issued by PPL and PRS Ltd rather than negotiating with each society separately. This is a notably simpler setup than the US market's four-PRO landscape.
United States
Covered in depth elsewhere in this series: ASCAP, BMI, SESAC, and GMR each represent a different, only partially overlapping, roster of songwriters and publishers. Businesses wanting broad coverage of contemporary music typically need blanket licenses from more than one.
Canada
Canada centralizes composition-side rights under a single PRO, SOCAN (Society of Composers, Authors and Music Publishers of Canada) simpler than the US in that respect. Recording-side rights are handled separately by Re:Sound Music Licensing Company, which collects on behalf of performers and record labels. Most commercial venues need coverage from both.
Australia & New Zealand
APRA (Australasian Performing Right Association) covers composition-side performing rights across both countries. AMCOS handles reproduction rights, and PPCA (Phonographic Performance Company of Australia) covers the recording side. In practice, Australian businesses often deal with APRA AMCOS as a combined body, plus PPCA separately for recordings.
Ireland
Ireland runs a similar two-part structure to the UKwhich is IMRO (Irish Music Rights Organisation) for composition rights, and PPI (Phonographic Performance Ireland) for recording rights with PPI being the Irish counterpart to the UK's PPL.
A sample of other major markets
- Germany: GEMA
- France: SACEM
- Japan: JASRAC
- South Africa: SAMRO
- Spain: SGAE
- India: The Indian Performing Right Society
Nearly every country with a functioning copyright system has at least one national collecting society along these lines while a full list runs well over 60 countries.
Why this matters for multi-location or international chains
If your business operates in more than one country, licensing isn't something you can set up once, centrally, and assume it covers everywhere. A hotel group with chains in the US and Canada, for example, needs US-side coverage (ASCAP/BMI/etc.) for its American locations and SOCAN/Re:Sound coverage for its Canadian ones. These are separate registrations with separate organizations, even though many national societies maintain reciprocal agreements with each other that streamline royalty distribution behind the scenes. Reciprocity affects how royalties eventually reach songwriters; it doesn't mean a single license automatically covers every country you operate in.
The practical shortcut, wherever you are
This is exactly the complexity a global, fully licensed commercial platform is built to remove. Rather than tracking which collecting society covers which country, which rights are split where, and renewing multiple region-specific licenses, a B2B service may or may not bundle the relevant clearances into the subscription itself just so a multi-location or international operator doesn't need a different licensing strategy for every market they operate in.
The one rule that never changes
Regardless of country, the same principle from earlier in this series holds everywhere: a personal consumer streaming subscription (Spotify, Apple Music, or otherwise) is licensed for private use only, worldwide. There's no country where a personal account becomes commercially compliant simply because the local rules are different. What changes from market to market is who you need permission from and not whether you need it.