The most common question we get isn't about music at all. It's how much is this going to cost me? OneMusic's pricing isn't hidden, but it is spread across more than twenty sector guides, each with its own units, tiers and add-ons. We read the current ones, pulled out the numbers for the businesses that ask us most often, and put them here in one place.
Everything below is OneMusic's own published rate for licences taken out between 1 September 2026 and 31 August 2027. All figures include GST. Where we quote a worked example, it's OneMusic's example, not ours. The source guides are linked at each section, and you should read them, because the rates go up with CPI every September and the guide is the document that binds.
Three things decide your bill.
First, what kind of business you are. OneMusic runs a separate scheme for dining, for fitness, for retail, for pubs, for hotels and so on, and each measures you differently. Second, how big you are in that scheme's unit: seats for a restaurant, members for a gym, square metres for a shop. Third, where your music comes from. This is the one that catches people. Playing the radio is the cheapest tier. Playing a CD or a commercial background-music supplier is the middle tier. Playing Spotify, Apple Music, YouTube or any personal streaming service is the most expensive tier, because you're also paying for the right to copy and deliver that music digitally.
The Dining scheme.
The Dining guide covers restaurants, cafés, bistros and counter-service food. Your price is set by seating capacity, counted inside and outside, anywhere the music can be heard. If you have six or fewer seats you're pushed into the Retail and Service Providers scheme instead, which prices on floor area.
For a café with seven to fifteen seats, background music from a streaming service (the Gold package) is $1,000.20 a year. From a CD or a commercial supplier (Silver) it's $431.12. From a radio or TV broadcast only (Bronze) it's $258.67. At sixteen to thirty seats those become $1,356.59, $787.51 and $327.65. At thirty-one to fifty seats, $1,931.41, $1,356.59 and $563.32. Above fifty seats the curve flattens: fifty-one to a hundred is $1,994.64 on Gold, and more than a hundred is $2,069.37.
Add-ons stack on top. Live or featured music, such as a Sunday jazz trio, is $14.66 per day for venues up to a hundred seats. Music on hold on a small phone system starts at $293.33 a year. OneMusic's own worked example is a twelve-seat patisserie streaming music through the room and on hold on a few phone lines: $1,476.85 a year, or about $123 a month. Its fish-and-chip shop example, ten seats and one radio, is $258.67.
The Fitness scheme.
The Fitness guide covers gyms, yoga, Pilates, barre, boxing, martial arts, boot camps and outdoor training. It gives you three ways to be charged, and which one you pick matters more than the sector.
All Inclusive is $43.02 per member per year, with a minimum of $457.10. It covers background music, music videos, every timetabled class, digital copying of up to two thousand tracks and music on hold. If your whole operation happens in one room through one device, OneMusic caps it at a hundred members, so the most a single-room studio pays on this package is $4,302. Background Music only is $1.65 per member per year with a $268.89 minimum, and covers open floor areas, reception and change rooms but not classes. Music in Classes is $6.62 per class, or, on the alternative option, $9.30 for classes with more than ten people and $4.00 for classes with ten or fewer. If you play from downloads or a streaming service, Digital Copy/Delivery adds $488.88.
Partial Rights Music: 48.25% off, and why.
Every OneMusic guide carries a line most people skim past. If your business doesn't use any PPCA sound recordings, the fee drops by 48.25%. If it doesn't use any APRA or AMCOS works, it drops by 48.25%. Those are the two copyrights in every commercial track, the recording and the song, and OneMusic prices each at roughly half the bill. The fitness guide even names the case it has in mind: directly-licensed music, which it notes is sometimes called royalty-free.
The deductions exist for businesses that use some OneMusic music. Use none of it, and the guide's own answer, under the heading asking whether you have to go through OneMusic at all, is that there are other options, including direct licensing arrangements or solely using music outside its repertoire. If neither copyright in what you play belongs to a society member, there's nothing for OneMusic to license.
What that means in practice.
Put the numbers next to each other. A small café streaming Spotify: $1,000.20 a year to OneMusic, plus the Spotify subscription, plus the fact that Spotify's own terms are for personal use, which the OneMusic guide is careful to say its licence does not override. A boutique gym on the minimum All Inclusive: $457.10. R FM is $13 a month, $156 a year, and one subscription covers every location you run, because we own both copyrights in every track and there's no society to pay.
The honest bit at the end.
OneMusic sells you the world's commercial catalogue. That's a real thing and for some rooms it's the right thing. If your brand needs the Top 40, or your class programme is built on specific tracks, pay for the licence and use the deduction if you can. What you're buying from R FM is different: original music, made for the room, with no letter attached. The right choice depends on what your customers are actually listening for. Most of the time, in most rooms, it isn't the artist.