The Real Cost of Pressing Play: Why Spotify in Your Store Can End in Court

A Stockholm restaurant is being sued over six months of background music. It's not an outlier. It's how music licensing enforcement works across Europe, and here's what every retail and hospitality operator should know.

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In August 2026, a restaurant in Stockholm learned an expensive lesson about background music. As reported by Svenska Dagbladet and Dagens Juridik, the venue received an invoice for the background music it had played between January and June this year. It didn't pay. So SAMI, the Swedish organization representing performing artists and musicians, filed a lawsuit at Stockholm District Court, demanding SEK 11,500.

Eleven and a half thousand kronor may not sound like a catastrophe. But that's precisely the point: this is what enforcement looks like for a single small venue over a single six-month period. Scale that across multiple locations, multiple years, and the legal costs of losing in court, and the picture changes quickly. And Sweden is far from unique. Collecting societies across Europe pursue thousands of businesses like this every year.

The mistake almost everyone makes: "But I pay for Spotify"

The most common misunderstanding in retail and hospitality is that a paid streaming subscription covers music in your store. It doesn't. Spotify's own terms are explicit: the service "is only for personal, non-commercial use," which means "you can't broadcast or play Spotify publicly from a business, such as bars, restaurants, schools, stores, salons, dance studios, radio stations, etc."

Playing music in a commercial space is legally a public performance, and public performance requires separate licenses, regardless of whether the music comes from Spotify, a radio, a CD, or a TV in the corner.

Two invoices, not one

Here's the part that surprises even operators who think they're covered: in most European countries, you need agreements with two separate organizations, because composers and performers are represented by different bodies.

In Sweden, that means both Stim (representing songwriters and composers) and SAMI (representing performing artists). Fees depend on factors like floor area and opening hours. The Stockholm restaurant now being sued had the SAMI side of that equation unresolved, and SAMI, like its counterparts abroad, doesn't treat unpaid invoices as a negotiation.

The same dual structure exists across Europe: PPL and PRS for Music in the UK (merged into a single license, TheMusicLicence), GEMA and GVL in Germany, SACEM and SPRÉ in France, Buma/Stemra and Sena in the Netherlands, SGAE together with AGEDI and AIE in Spain.

What enforcement actually looks like across Europe

Spain. In 2024, a court in Ciudad Real ordered a restaurant in Campo de Criptana to pay €1,079.98, split between SGAE, AGEDI and AIE, plus legal costs, for playing protected music through the venue's televisions without authorization. Again: a four-figure sum for one small venue, before lawyers' fees.

United Kingdom. PPL PRS has taken 144 businesses to court since 2020, including small newsagents and convenience stores. More than 613 retailers took out TheMusicLicence in a single year after being caught playing music unlicensed. Businesses caught out face a 50% higher royalty rate than those who licensed proactively.

Germany. GEMA doesn't need to go to court to make unlicensed music expensive. Backed by a Federal Court of Justice precedent, it applies a control-cost surcharge of up to 100% on top of the regular tariff, effectively doubling the bill. A 150 m² shop that would have paid around €300 for a year of music ends up owing roughly €600; a 500 m² gym sees ~€960 become ~€1,920. Ignorance of the rules is explicitly not a defense.

France. French law treats unauthorized public playback of protected music as contrefaçon, or copyright infringement, which on paper carries penalties of up to €300,000 and three years' imprisonment. In practice, SACEM enforcement usually means back payments and losing access to discounted rates, but the legal ceiling shows how seriously the law takes it.

And for global context: the United States. American law allows statutory damages of $750 to $30,000 per song, and up to $150,000 for willful infringement. Collecting societies ASCAP and BMI file federal lawsuits against bars, restaurants and hotels continuously; in June 2026 a Baltimore venue was ordered to pay $18,500 in damages and fees, and in 2024 Sony Music pursued Marriott International in a case with a theoretical exposure around $140 million.

The uncomfortable math for multi-location retail

For a single café, an SEK 11,500 claim or a €1,000 judgment is painful but survivable. For a retail chain, the risk multiplies by every store, every speaker, every month. Licensing fees scale with floor area and opening hours; surcharges and back-payments scale with how long you got it wrong; and enforcement bodies increasingly share information and run active inspection programs. The businesses that end up in court are rarely willful pirates. They're operators who assumed a Spotify Premium account, or one of two required licenses, was enough.

Three ways to get this right

The first option is full compliance the traditional way: contact the collecting societies in every country you operate in, license both the composer side and the performer side, and budget for fees that rise with your footprint. It works, but it's a permanent, growing line item with real administrative overhead.

The second is to stop using PRO-registered music altogether. Music that sits outside the collecting societies' catalogs, meaning properly royalty-free or rights-included music, removes the licensing obligation at the source, though quality and brand fit vary wildly.

The third is where we'll admit our bias. At Tonada, we generate original music for physical spaces: composed for your brand, adaptive to your data, and entirely outside PRO catalogs. No Stim or SAMI invoices, no GEMA surcharges, no letter from a collecting society's field inspector. Just music that belongs in your space, legally and creatively.

Whichever route you choose, choose one deliberately. The Stockholm restaurant now waiting on a court date would tell you: the most expensive playlist is the one you never licensed.

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Sources: Svenska Dagbladet, Dagens Juridik, Spotify Support, Stim, Infobae, Better Retailing, Sonic Sense on GEMA surcharges, Novlaw on SACEM, Music for Business Finder.