How to reduce your music licence cost: your options
Four realistic ways to lower a business music licence bill — and the one that recovers money without changing a thing about how you operate.
If your music-licence bill feels high, there are a few legitimate ways to bring it down. Which one fits depends on whether the bill is simply wrong, or whether you want to change how you source music. Here are the honest options — including where we fit, and where we don’t.
1. Check your invoice is actually correct
TheMusicLicence is built from many inputs — audible area, usage type, hours, sites, staff or seating — so errors are common: over-stated area, background music billed as live entertainment, a first-year higher rate left on beyond year one, or closed sites still charged. Correcting these reduces the bill to what you should have been paying, and can recover past overpayments, without changing anything about how you operate. This is what an audit does.
2. Review how you source music
Some businesses reduce cost by moving to genuinely royalty-free or specifically-licensed background music services. This can remove or reduce the need for TheMusicLicence — but only if you genuinely stop playing licensed commercial music across the business. It’s a real change to how you operate, and getting it wrong (e.g. staff playing the radio) leaves you unlicensed, so it needs care.
3. The free complaints route
If you have a service or accuracy complaint, there’s a free, approved complaints route via the Dispute Resolution Ombudsman (usually after a deadlock letter). Worth knowing: it can look at service and accuracy, but it has no jurisdiction over the pricing, structure or scope of the tariffs themselves — which is exactly why correcting your declarations and classification is usually the productive path.
4. Do nothing — and keep overpaying
The default. Because the licensing body won’t proactively correct an over-statement in your favour, an error tends to persist year after year, compounding across a multi-site estate.
Where we fit
We’re independent (not affiliated with PPL PRS Ltd, PPL or PRS for Music) and we specialise in multi-site estates. We review your invoices line by line against the official published tariffs, agree the comparison basis with you, and only charge a share of savings we actually verify — no savings, no fee. If your invoice is already correct, we’ll tell you that too.
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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.