No, not on a personal plan. Spotify’s terms of use grant “personal, non-commercial use”, and its own support page says you cannot play Spotify publicly from a business, naming bars, restaurants, stores and salons. Apple Music puts it in different words with the same effect: “personal, noncommercial purposes”. What a restaurant needs instead is a music subscription sold for business use, and in most countries a performing-rights licence on top. Two contracts, and plenty of places need both.
What do Spotify’s and Apple Music’s terms say?
Spotify’s US Terms of Use, last updated 4 September 2026, grant a “limited, non-exclusive, revocable permission to make personal, non-commercial use of the Spotify Service”. A dining room is a commercial use.
The support page, “Spotify for public or commercial use”, says it without the legal furniture. Spotify is for “personal, non-commercial use”, and you “can’t broadcast or play Spotify publicly from a business, such as bars, restaurants, schools, stores, salons, dance studios, radio stations, etc.” That page points to Soundtrack as Spotify’s partner service for businesses.
Apple’s Media Services Terms and Conditions (US), last updated 15 September 2025, say “You may use the Services and Content only for personal, noncommercial purposes”. There is no separate clause about playing in public. The restriction is the grant itself. The licence you bought is a personal one, and a dining room is not that.
What music service can a restaurant use instead?
A background-music subscription sold to businesses, whose terms allow exactly what the personal plan forbids. Three of them, with what each says about itself as of September 2026.
Soundtrack is the service Spotify’s own support page names. It sells background music on a subscription, with players for phones, tablets and computers, and its site lists a desktop player for Windows and macOS. Soundtrack says its US and Canadian subscriptions include some performing-rights licensing, with exceptions for places that charge admission or run live music. Read its licensing page for your own country before you count on that.
SiriusXM Music for Business is $26.95 a month, and its page says the price “handles all BMI, ASCAP, GMR, and SESAC licensing costs”, which are the four US performing-rights organisations. It lists Sonos and a PC or Mac among the players it runs on. The page reads as US-only.
Sonos Pro is $35 a month per location, aimed at places already running Sonos speakers. It includes Sonos Backgrounds, a set of commercially licensed music, plus scheduled playlists and a dashboard for managing several venues, and it reaches Soundtrack and Mood Mix from inside the Sonos app.
Do I also need a GEMA, PPL PRS or ASCAP licence?
Usually, and it is the owner’s job rather than the music service’s. Songwriters, composers and record labels are paid for music played in public through collecting societies, and in most countries a restaurant registers with one and pays a fee set by its size. Country rules differ, and what is true in one says nothing about the next, so here are three, separately.
Germany. GEMA is the society, and a restaurant registers its music use with it. GEMA’s page for the hospitality trade lists its smallest background-music package, Gastronomie S, from €69.10 a month, covering radio, audio streaming and recorded music. GEMA licenses the public performance and is not a party to Spotify’s or Apple’s contract, so the personal-use term in those stands whatever GEMA is paid. Whether a given business service bills GEMA inside its subscription or leaves that to you has changed over the years, so ask the service rather than assume.
United Kingdom. PPL PRS issues TheMusicLicence, which covers two rights at once, PPL for the recordings and PRS for the compositions. In its own words: “If you play or perform music in your business or organisation, the chances are you need” one. The fee depends on the kind of business and its size, quoted per sector on its site.
United States. Four organisations, ASCAP, BMI, SESAC and GMR, each licence a separate catalogue, and a licence from one does not cover the others. That is why SiriusXM’s page names all four. US copyright law also has a narrow exemption for small food and drink places using consumer equipment, with limits on floor area and speaker count. Whether music from a streaming service falls inside it is not something we could confirm from the law’s own text, so treat that exemption as a question for a lawyer rather than a plan.
Does playing the music from a Mac change the licence?
No. Whether the music comes out of a phone, a Sonos, a laptop at the till or a Mac in the back office, the terms of the service and the rules of your country are the same. A Mac is not a loophole, and this post is not offering one.
What a Mac changes is how many speakers the licensed player reaches. macOS sends every app’s sound to one speaker at a time, so a business service’s Mac app or browser tab plays in one room unless the player has a multi-speaker picker built in. Apple’s Music app has one. Most others do not, which is why the bar has music and the terrace has nothing. How to play Spotify on multiple AirPlay speakers from a Mac explains the same mechanism at home.
How do I play the music on every speaker in the restaurant?
Once the two contracts are sorted, this last part is only a speaker question. Audiout is our menu-bar app for the Mac, and it sends whatever the Mac is playing to the speakers you tick: AirPlay 2 speakers including Sonos models that support it, HomePod, Apple TV, Bluetooth and Chromecast, each with its own volume, under one Main Audio fader that caps the whole place. €24.99 once, with a free 14-day trial of Audiout for Mac that asks for no card and no email. It plays what the Mac plays and nothing else, so a personal plan stays personal and a licensed service stays licensed.
Set the bar, the dining room and the terrace once, save them as a scene, and picking that scene again brings each speaker back to the volume you saved. Turn on launch at login along with “Reconnect last speakers when Audiout starts” and, in the words of the support page, “your rooms come back without you touching anything”. The Mac has to be awake and running, since it is the thing playing the music. Restaurant music from a Mac walks through the setup speaker by speaker.
If you already run Sonos throughout, Sonos Pro is the shortest line between here and music that is allowed to be on. In the US, a subscription that folds all four organisations into one bill saves you four separate conversations. In Germany or the UK, plan for two bills and stop being surprised by the second. Either way, start with the boring half. Ask what your country’s society charges for a room your size, then choose the music around that number.
Common questions
Can I play my own Spotify account in my café?
No. Spotify's terms grant "personal, non-commercial use", and its support page names bars, restaurants, stores and salons among the places that need a business service instead. Apple Music is the same, with terms that say "personal, noncommercial purposes". The fix is a subscription sold for business use.
Do I need both a business music service and a music licence?
In most countries, yes, because they are two separate contracts. The business music subscription replaces the personal plan and gives you music you are allowed to play. The performing-rights licence pays the writers and performers for music played in public, and it is the owner's job to hold one. Some subscriptions include that licence in some countries, so check what yours covers where you are.
How much does a music licence for a restaurant cost?
It depends on the country and the size of the room. GEMA in Germany lists its smallest background-music package, Gastronomie S, from €69.10 a month. PPL PRS in the UK quotes TheMusicLicence per sector and size. In the US the fee is split across four organisations unless a business music subscription bundles them.