Yes. If you play commercial music anywhere a member can hear it, on the floor, in a class, in the change rooms, at the front desk, you need a public performance licence, and in Australia that means OneMusic. What most gym owners don't know is that fitness is one of the more expensive sectors to license, and that the way you choose to be charged can double or halve the bill.
The law doesn't care that it's a workout.
The Copyright Act 1968 gives the owners of a song and of its recording the exclusive right to have it performed or heard in public. A gym is a public place run for profit, so playing a track there is a public performance regardless of whether anyone is listening or just lifting. Your Spotify subscription doesn't cover it; those terms are for personal use, and OneMusic's own fitness guide says its licence doesn't override them either.
The scheme covers more than gyms. Yoga, Pilates, barre, boxing, martial arts, aqua fitness, boot camps in a park and outdoor CrossFit all fall under it, as long as there's an instructor and a timetable. A freelance instructor who runs sessions across other people's venues is licensed under the same scheme, with a smaller digital-copy fee if they run fewer than 75 classes a year.
Per member, per class, or all inclusive.
For licences taken out from 1 September 2026, OneMusic gives fitness businesses three ways to pay. All Inclusive is $43.02 per member per year, minimum $457.10, and covers everything: background music, music videos, every class, digital copies of up to two thousand tracks and music on hold. If your whole business runs in one room through one device, it's capped at a hundred members, so a single-room studio never pays more than $4,302 on it.
Background Music alone is $1.65 per member per year with a minimum of $268.89. That covers the open floor, reception and change rooms, and, importantly, small group PT sessions of eight or fewer where the music is just whatever's already playing in the room. Music in Classes is $6.62 per timetabled class, or on the alternative option $9.30 for classes over ten people and $4.00 for classes of ten or fewer. And if any of that music comes from a download or a streaming service rather than a CD or a commercial supplier, Digital Copy/Delivery adds $488.88 a year.
Timetabled classes are the expensive part.
Look at where the money goes in those examples. The background music is cheap; it's the classes that cost. A studio running five classes a day is paying for over 1,800 performances a year, at $6.62 each, before the digital-copy fee. That's why the per-member All Inclusive package exists and why OneMusic's own example picks it. If you run a lot of classes for a modest membership, do the sum both ways.
Pre-choreographed programmes deserve their own line. If your instructors run a branded class built on specific commercial tracks, the guide counts that as Music in Classes, and the programme's supplier may or may not include the OneMusic licence in what you pay them. Ask. It's a yes-or-no question and the answer decides whether you're covered.
The honest map.
Here's the part we'd rather say plainly than have you discover later. Royalty-free music replaces the background line completely. The floor, reception, change rooms, group PT with the room music on: if every track is one where both the song and the recording belong to the supplier, there's no PPCA recording and no APRA work in play, and OneMusic's own guides describe that as music outside their repertoire, with nothing to license. That's what R FM is, and it's $13 a month for every location you run.
It does not replace the class line if your instructors are playing commercial tracks in class. If the 6pm spin class runs on the Top 40, that class needs a licence no matter what's playing in reception. Some studios switch the classes to royalty-free too, and then the whole bill goes away. Some can't, because the programme is the music. Know which one you are before you cancel anything.
The honest bit at the end.
We make background music, and we're good at the gym floor at six in the morning. We are not pretending to be a choreographed class programme. If your business is the floor and the front desk, R FM takes the OneMusic question off your desk. If your business is the classes, use the numbers above to pick the cheaper package, and put R FM on the floor anyway, because $1.65 a member adds up and the flat fee doesn't.