Royalty free music/ radio

Sparky29

My wife runs a small cafe and the business can't afford to pay the PRS and PPL licence. Can anybody recommend any royalty free sources of music?

Thanks for any replies.

Savvy_Sue

If you search this board for 'royalty free' several threads come up, sorry I don't have time to look and see if any are more useful than others!

Alternatively (and here's radical!) do you HAVE to have music / radio playing? My family actively avoids places with background noise because we all have a hearing loss, and the less interference the better.

fred7777

Halfway down this page there is a good list of sites:

http://www.goingware.com/tips/legal-downloads.html#intro

Unfortunately many charge their Royalty when you download (free use thereafter) so some are not free.

Another alternative is to find old recordings of music. Copyright for writers only last 70 years after the writes death and for performers only 50 years from the recording date so you could be safe with recordings of classical music from before 1961 and any recordings before say 1920.

chalkie99

Savvy_Sue wrote: »

Alternatively (and here's radical!) do you HAVE to have music / radio playing? My family actively avoids places with background noise because we all have a hearing loss, and the less interference the better.

The problem with this is that I would like to think that a license is needed only if you are playing music to customers and thus, in some way, benefiting your business. However , the regulatory bodies seem to have developed their own rules on when fees are payable.

There are a couple of lengthy discussions ongoing about this at UK Business Forums. Have a look, for example, at this thread:

http://www.ukbusinessforums.co.uk/forums/showthread.php?t=208005

and scroll down to Post 7. Seems, basically, you can not even have a radio on the premises, even to listen to the news while you are closed!

paulwf

I expect you've already done this OP so apologies if I'm stating the obvious but have you actually called up PRS and PPL and found out what licenses would be required and at what cost? I think you might not need both licenses if you just use radio not CD etc?

If it turns out that the cost is less than expected it might just be worth paying it. After seeing some of the long forum threads on here and elsewhere I think there comes a point where its isn't worth the time and effort to keep dodging them, plus the alternatives look fairly naff and don't seem to save much money. If you're going to play music to customers then make it decent music. Good music creates such a good atmosphere you should be able to recoup the costs through extra sales or just put your drinks up by 5p.

Sparky29

paulwf wrote: »

I expect you've already done this OP so apologies if I'm stating the obvious but have you actually called up PRS and PPL and found out what licenses would be required and at what cost? I think you might not need both licenses if you just use radio not CD etc?

If it turns out that the cost is less than expected it might just be worth paying it. After seeing some of the long forum threads on here and elsewhere I think there comes a point where its isn't worth the time and effort to keep dodging them, plus the alternatives look fairly naff and don't seem to save much money. If you're going to play music to customers then make it decent music. Good music creates such a good atmosphere you should be able to recoup the costs through extra sales or just put your drinks up by 5p.

We got the PRS licence and then started getting pestered by PPL. It costs hundreds of pounds for both licences and apparently we need both. We are exploring alternatives as we only have it as background noise and its not really that loud to be heard properly anyway.

Horace

OP, you do need both licences as you have discovered, if you say you can barely hear the music that you have playing do you really need it on at all?

I can see that music fills in the gaps in a quiet room, however, people's volume increases as they try and compete with the music however quiet it may be.

proxitech

Incompetech (Google it, I'm too new to post links)

They don't have actual MUSIC as such but they have lots of soundtrack pieces. This might not be what you are looking for but they have some great (long) ambient pieces.