The question usually arrives as do I need both APRA and PPCA? The short answer is that since 2019 you deal with one organisation, OneMusic, and one invoice. The longer answer, the reason there were ever two, is the whole story of why a business pays for music at all. It takes about six minutes and it's worth having, because it's the difference between knowing you're covered and hoping you are.
Every song is two things.
A recorded track has two separate copyrights living inside it. The first is the musical work: the melody and lyrics, owned by whoever wrote them, usually a songwriter and a publisher. The second is the sound recording: the specific performance captured in the studio, owned by whoever paid for the session, usually a record label, with the recording artist attached.
The Copyright Act 1968 gives each owner a set of exclusive rights. For the musical work, one of those is the right to perform it in public. For the sound recording, it's the right to cause the recording to be heard in public. A café playing a track through its speakers is doing both at once. Two rights, two owners, two permissions required.
APRA AMCOS and PPCA.
No café is going to ring a publisher in Los Angeles for permission to play a song. So the owners pool their rights into collecting societies that license on their behalf and pass the money back. APRA AMCOS represents the songwriters, composers and publishers, more than 124,000 members according to OneMusic's own guides, plus affiliated societies overseas. PPCA, the Phonographic Performance Company of Australia, represents the record labels and registered recording artists. One society per copyright.
For decades that meant two licences, two invoices and two compliance letters. A business that sorted its APRA licence would get a PPCA letter a year later and assume it was a scam. Some of them still do.
Why OneMusic exists.
OneMusic Australia launched in 2019 as a joint initiative of APRA AMCOS and PPCA. It bundles both sets of rights into one licence, priced per sector, and then splits the money it collects back to the two societies. When the letter arrives it comes from OneMusic, but the rights behind it haven't changed. You're still paying for the song and the recording; you're just paying once.
So do I need both?
If you play mainstream recorded music, you need both rights, and you get them in one OneMusic licence. That's the normal case, and it's why the question feels like it has a yes-or-no answer.
The interesting cases are the partial ones, and OneMusic prices them. If you only ever have live musicians playing covers, you're using the songs but not anyone's recording: APRA's half applies, PPCA's doesn't, and the guides give a 48.25% deduction for it. If you play recordings where the song is out of copyright but the recording isn't, it flips the other way. And if both the song and the recording belong to someone who has licensed you directly, or who owns both and simply lets you play them, neither society has a claim and there's nothing to license.
The broadcast is licensed. Your speakers aren't.
A last thing that surprises people. The radio station has a licence, so surely playing the radio in your shop is covered? It isn't. The station's licence covers the broadcast. Playing that broadcast to your customers is a second public performance, yours, and OneMusic's cheapest tier in most schemes, the broadcast-only package, exists precisely to charge for it. It's less than streaming, but it isn't nothing.
The honest bit at the end.
We built R FM so that the two-layer test comes back clean every time. We write the music and we make the recordings, so both copyrights sit with us and we license them to you directly for a flat $13 a month. That's the whole trick. It isn't a loophole; it's the case OneMusic's own guides describe when they talk about directly-licensed music. If you'd rather keep the commercial catalogue, take the licence, and at least you'll now know what the two halves of it are for.