Music licence for hotels: the areas you pay for and the ones you shouldn’t

Hotels almost always need TheMusicLicence, and they’re among the most complex accounts because music is used in several distinct areas — the bar, the restaurant, public lounges, function and event rooms, spa or gym facilities, and sometimes background music in corridors and receptions. Each area can attract its own tariff and usage type, so a hotel bill is really a stack of smaller bills — and errors in any one of them repeat every year.

What drives the cost for a hotel?

• Each music-using area: bar, restaurant, lounges, reception, leisure facilities.
• Function and event rooms — usually billed by the number of events or days of use.
• Live music, DJs and events versus background music.
• The number of sites in a group, and whether a first-year higher rate applies.

What does it typically cost?

There’s no single figure — a small B&B playing background music in a breakfast room is worlds apart from a hotel with a busy events calendar. Because the total is built from several tariffs, an accurate number needs your invoice and a picture of how each area is used. We’ll work it out precisely rather than quote a guess.

The concessions most hotels miss

The hotel tariff is the most concession-heavy in the whole estate — which is good news for you, because every concession is a place the bill can be too high. Worth checking on every property:

• Bedrooms are charged in blocks (per set number of rooms, or part of a block) — so a floor taken out of service, or rooms converted to storage, can keep being billed unless the count is updated.
• There’s a cap for small residential hotels (limited letting bedrooms, facilities for residents only) that is routinely not applied where it should be.
• A seasonal reduction applies if you only open part of the year.
• A discount applies where the same room has more than one music source.
• The device/source type — a TV or radio versus a video jukebox — swings the charge substantially, and it’s a single field that’s often recorded wrong.

Across a group of 8+ hotels, a single missed concession repeats on every property — which is exactly where the recoverable numbers get large.

Where hotels commonly overpay

• Paying for function/event rooms as though they’re in use far more often than they are.
• Areas billed that no longer play music (or never did).
• Live-entertainment tariffs applied to areas that only have background music.
• The same misclassification repeated across a group of hotels.

Hotels are where the biggest recoveries tend to sit, precisely because the bills are complicated. Send us your invoices and we’ll check every area against the official tariffs for free. No savings, no fee.

• Music licence for restaurants, pubs & bars →
• 5 ways businesses overpay →
• How to reduce your music licence cost →

This guide is general information, not legal advice, and MLC is an independent consultancy — not affiliated with PPL PRS Ltd, PRS for Music or PPL.