Music Licensing Is Becoming a Brand Virtue, Not Just a Legal Box

New research on 1,250 shoppers, commissioned by licensing body OneMusic with Inside Retail, found that being licensed is now a trust signal customers reward, and its absence one they punish. New Zealand was one of the two markets studied, so this is not a lesson borrowed from somewhere else: it is what your own customers told the researchers.

Most shoppers don’t know it’s the law

In the study, 56% of consumers didn’t realise that playing music in a commercial setting requires a licence. Plenty of operators still assume a personal Spotify account covers the shop floor. It doesn’t. Playing music in a New Zealand business normally requires a licence from OneMusic New Zealand, the joint licensing initiative between APRA AMCOS and Recorded Music NZ, covering both the composition and the sound recording, unless the music is licensed directly by its owner.

That knowledge gap has created a grey zone where some operators gamble on not being caught. The research argues that calculation is getting short-sighted: as awareness grows, so does the expectation that businesses operate ethically and within the law.

Being licensed reads as doing the right thing

When shoppers were shown a “Licensed to Play” sticker in a business window, sentiment was strongly favourable, and New Zealanders responded more warmly than Australians on both measures.

Metric	New Zealand	Australia
View a licensed venue positively because it shows the business is “doing the right thing”	30%	27%
Would judge a non-compliant venue negatively and may take their spending elsewhere	12%	11%

Close to a third of your customers read a licence as evidence you do the right thing, and roughly one in eight will hold its absence against you.

Gen Z can hear the difference

“Royalty-free” playlists are a false economy if your audience skews young. In the study, 75% of Gen Z consumers could instantly tell real music from generic elevator music, and to them stock tracks read as budget, uncool and inauthentic. If your brand is about quality, your playlist has to feature quality music.

Three takeaways for New Zealand venues

• Get compliant. Whether through OneMusic New Zealand or directly licensed music, compliance shields you from infringement claims under the Copyright Act 1994.
• Show it. Displaying proof of your licence is a low-effort trust signal that resonates with around 30% of your customers and alienates almost no one.
• Train your team. “We support the artists we play” turns a legal obligation into a brand story.

Do both, in one subscription

The research points to a real tension: play licensed, real music that younger customers respect, and prove you’re compliant. Melodial does both for only NZ$9.99/month. Melodial owns its catalogue outright, so your subscription is the licence, with a professionally curated library and a Certificate of Compliance you can put in the window as your own trust asset.