You might love their taste in music, but if staff plug in an iPod or play their favourite downloads without the right music license your venue could be up for a hefty fine.

Troy Cooper is a music licensing specialist and the founder of Zoo Business Media.

“If you run a business and use music, you need to pay for the ‘right’ to use that music…simple,” he says.

Music can enhance the ambience of a store or business, influencing customers, motivating staff and improving sales, but there will be a price to pay if it’s not licensed.

The Phonographic Performance Company of Australia (PPCA) is authorised by record labels to grant licences to, and collect fees from, any business playing recorded music in public.

The licence fee varies according to the venue: restaurants and cafes, hotels and motels, fitness classes, gyms are all coded differently.

However it is common for there to be two copyrights in any recording – in addition to the record label and recording artist copyrights, there is a fee to be paid to the songwriters and publishers; APRA grants these licences.

The consequences of non-compliance can be severe.

In July 2010 a Queensland club was taken to court for playing music for three years while unlicensed. The result was a Federal Magistrates Court judgment against the club as well as the director and former director of that company.

And there was a hefty fine too: the company and the directors had to repay PPCA $145,332.95 in tariff E1 license fees for the venue (including back fees) as well as interest of almost $15,000. The Court also awarded PPCA damages of $90,000.

The last thing a business wants is to face legal action for copyright infringement. But there’s an easy way to overcome all this administration.

“A reputable background music supplier is really a one stop shop that can supply the right style of music for your venue as well as having the appropriate licenses in place to cover all the music use mentioned earlier,” Cooper explains.

“Normally you pay a monthly subscription and everything is covered. Some providers also own directly licensed content that can be played in restaurants and bistros without the need for a PPCA public performance licence.”

Cooper says the savings made in the PPCA fee in many cases more than cover the entire cost of subscribing to the music service.

“Recently, a well-known franchised coffee chain swapped over to using directly licensed music and is now saving more than $200,000 annually in fees.”

As leading suppliers of audio visual marketing solutions Zoo Business Media provides custom playlists to business – with licensing included.  ZBM collects on behalf of both PPCA and APRA, which means all its clients are compliant with copyright law.