A café's sound is half the reason people sit down and most of the reason they stay. It's also the part of the business that's easiest to get legally wrong, because it feels like nothing. Someone plugs in a phone, opens Spotify, and the room has music. Here's what that costs, what the alternatives cost, and what to put on once you've decided.
What a café is, according to the licence.
OneMusic licenses cafés under its Dining scheme, and prices you on seating capacity: every seat you generally put out for customers, inside and out, anywhere the music can be heard. Count the footpath tables. If you have six seats or fewer you're not a dining venue in OneMusic's eyes at all; you fall under the Retail and Service Providers scheme, which prices on floor area.
For the year starting 1 September 2026, a café with seven to fifteen seats pays $1,000.20 a year to play music from a streaming service, $431.12 to play from a CD or a commercial background-music supplier, and $258.67 to play a radio or TV broadcast only. Sixteen to thirty seats is $1,356.59, $787.51 and $327.65. If you're open fewer than 150 days a year, the package rate halves. If you bring in a musician for Sunday afternoons, that's $14.66 per day on top.
Why the radio costs a quarter of Spotify.
The device on the counter decides the tier. The radio is cheapest because the broadcast itself is already licensed and you're only paying for the second performance, the one through your speakers. Streaming is dearest because the top tier also covers copying and delivering the music digitally from a personal service, and because it's the source most businesses actually use.
There's a second problem with the phone-and-Spotify setup that the OneMusic guide is careful to spell out: its licence doesn't override the streaming service's own terms, and the consumer services are for personal use. So the $1,000.20 buys you the copyright permission, but not necessarily the platform's. Two permissions, and the licence only covers one of them.
The room at 8am is not the room at 2pm.
The research on this is old and consistent. Ronald Milliman's 1986 restaurant study, which OneMusic itself cites in its dining guide, found that slower-tempo background music kept diners at the table longer and lifted what they spent at the bar while they sat there. Faster music turned tables faster. Neither is right; they're levers. A café that lives on the morning takeaway rush wants tempo before ten. The same café at two in the afternoon, with laptops open and a lull at the till, wants the opposite.
Three practical rules we'd give any owner. Keep it instrumental, or nearly so, in a room where people are talking; lyrics compete with conversation and lose. Keep it under the level of the espresso machine; if the music is audible over steaming milk it's too loud for a table for two. And don't let the shift decide. The nineteen-year-old on the morning bar has excellent taste and it is not your customers'. Pick a mood for the room and pin it.
If you run two or three sites.
OneMusic licenses per location, so a second café is a second Dining licence at whatever its seat count implies. Three fifteen-seat sites on streaming is three times $1,000.20. That's the point where the flat-fee model starts to look different: R FM is one subscription for however many locations you run, and the pricing page says the same thing whether you have one room or ten.
The honest bit at the end.
We're a music service for exactly this room, so read the above with that in mind. We'd still say it if we weren't: get the seating count right, know which tier your device puts you in, and if you're going to pay OneMusic, pay it properly rather than hoping the letter doesn't come. If you'd rather not pay it at all, that's what we're for. Original music, both copyrights ours, a flat $13 a month, and a Background Jazz mood that's been through a lot of cafés already.