A music licence for an Australian restaurant seating 31 to 50 costs A$1,931.41 a year on OneMusic's top Gold tier and A$563.32 on Bronze, and Skai Solutions priced the same room in New Zealand at NZ$758.37.
Those are published rates, not estimates: the Australian figures come from the OneMusic Australia Dining guide dated July 2026 for the 2026-27 licence period, and the New Zealand figures from the OneMusic Hospitality fact sheet for 1 October 2025 to 30 September 2026. Both include GST. What follows is the full rate card for both countries, the reason the two prices are so far apart, and the separate licence that covers the music your callers hear on hold.
The scheme is called OneMusic Australia Dining, and OneMusic is the joint licensing initiative of APRA AMCOS and PPCA. It prices on two things: how many seats you have, and where the music comes from. The rates below are from the OneMusic Dining information guide dated July 2026 and apply to licences taken out between 1 September 2026 and 31 August 2027. Every figure includes GST.
| Dining area capacity | Gold | Silver | Bronze |
|---|---|---|---|
| 7 to 15 seats | A$1,000.20 | A$431.12 | A$258.67 |
| 16 to 30 seats | A$1,356.59 | A$787.51 | A$327.65 |
| 31 to 50 seats | A$1,931.41 | A$1,356.59 | A$563.32 |
| 51 to 100 seats | A$1,994.64 | A$1,425.57 | A$592.07 |
| 101 seats and over | A$2,069.37 | A$1,500.29 | A$620.81 |
Dining area capacity is the number of seats you normally put out for customers inside and outside, wherever the music can be heard. Not covers served, not the fire capacity. Six seats or fewer and you are on the Retail and Service Providers scheme, not this one.
Two deductions are worth knowing. If your venue opens fewer than 150 days a year, a 50% deduction applies to the background music rate. And a 48.25% deduction applies where none of the PPCA sound recordings are used, or none of the APRA and AMCOS works are used, because you are then licensing only half the rights.
Because the tier is set by the source, not by the volume knob. Bronze covers music that reaches your room only through a terrestrial or digital broadcast, so radio and free-to-air TV. Silver adds CDs, vinyl, internet radio and a commercial background music supplier. Gold adds an online stream or a download from a personal digital music service.
That distinction is what most operators get wrong, and it is expensive. For a 7 to 15 seat cafe, Gold is A$1,000.20 and Bronze is A$258.67. Working from those two published figures, playing a phone through the speakers instead of the radio costs A$741.53 more a year, which is 3.9 times the Bronze rate. On a 31 to 50 seat restaurant the same gap is A$1,368.09.
None of that is a reason to switch the music off. It is a reason to know which tier you are actually on before the renewal arrives, because the tier is decided by the device your staff reach for at 7am, not by what you told anyone.
OneMusic New Zealand is the APRA AMCOS and Recorded Music NZ joint licence, and it meters something completely different: floor area. The rates below are from the OneMusic Hospitality fact sheet, include 15% GST, and apply to the period 1 October 2025 to 30 September 2026.
| Premises area | Restaurants and cafes | Pubs and bars |
|---|---|---|
| 0 to 49 square metres | NZ$408.30 | NZ$510.50 |
| 50 to 99 square metres | NZ$495.91 | NZ$656.24 |
| 100 to 149 square metres | NZ$583.42 | NZ$802.18 |
| 150 to 199 square metres | NZ$670.96 | NZ$948.05 |
| 200 to 249 square metres | NZ$758.47 | NZ$1,093.89 |
| 250 to 299 square metres | NZ$845.96 | NZ$1,239.78 |
| 300 square metres and over | NZ$933.48 | NZ$1,385.61 |
Then the part that catches people: Digital Delivery is a separate NZ$350.07 a year per premises, and you need it if you download, copy, or stream music from a service like Spotify, YouTube or Apple Music. Live performers run NZ$16.06 to NZ$24.79 a day by area, DJs NZ$21.86 to NZ$30.64, karaoke the same as live performers. A ticket price of NZ$35 or more pushes the event out of this licence entirely.
One trap in the definitions. A restaurant with a bar in the same room is licensed on the cumulative area at the pub and bar rate, not the cheaper restaurant rate. At 100 to 149 square metres that is NZ$802.18 instead of NZ$583.42.
Take one venue: a 40 seat cafe of about 45 square metres that plays a streaming service through the speakers. The two published rate cards give very different answers, and this is our arithmetic from the tables above, not a figure either organisation publishes.
The Australian venue pays about 2.5 times what the New Zealand one pays, before any currency conversion, for exactly the same act. The reason is structural: Australia prices the source and New Zealand prices the floor. An Australian operator who moves from streaming to radio drops to A$563.32. A New Zealand operator who does the same drops the Digital Delivery line and halves the background rate, to about NZ$204.15. The lever exists in both countries, it is just worth far more in Australia.
Fifteen minutes, your menu, your hours, and the calls your room is too loud to take.
Book a Free DemoYes, in Australia, and this is the line almost nobody publishes. Under the OneMusic Dining scheme, Telephone on Hold is a separate licence category with its own table, priced by caller capacity lines, meaning how many callers you can have on hold at once. For a single location with 1 to 2 lines it is A$293.33 a year for communication only, and A$366.66 where you have made a copy of the music, which includes pulling it from a digital music service. At 3 to 5 lines it is A$384.99 and A$476.65.
For a venue on a cloud phone system the guide says the concept applies to the number of simultaneous users across all locations, so a small multi-site group can land higher than it expects. It is a small number on its own and an easy one to miss entirely, which is the point. If you have ever wondered what a caller hears while your phone rings out, the answer is on what your answering machine message should say, and an AI receptionist removes the hold queue rather than soundtracking it.
OneMusic Australia's own wording is that playing copyright-protected music in a business without permission may be an infringement of copyright, which may lead to legal action and significant costs, and that a court proceeding can result in the business paying not only the licence fees that would have applied but damages and legal fees on top. OneMusic New Zealand points at the Copyright Act 1994, which sets out the public performance right and the penalties for breaching it.
Neither organisation publishes a schedule of fines, so anyone quoting you a specific penalty number for a cafe is guessing. What is publishable is that the licence fee itself is small relative to the other fixed costs on your profit and loss. Set against rent at 11% to 17% of turnover for a small venue, a few hundred dollars a year is not the line that decides anything.
Be honest about the ceiling here. The whole exercise is worth a few hundred to about fifteen hundred dollars a year for a single venue. If you are looking for real money, the margin page and delivery commission are where the digits are. Music licensing is a compliance item you should get right once and then stop thinking about.
Music is charged nationally. The licence that is not national is BYO, and it is answered three different ways in the three biggest hospitality states: nothing at all in New South Wales, a A$345.40 permit with eleven weeks notice in Victoria, and a council matter in Queensland. The state by state position is in do you need a BYO licence in Australia.
Footpath seating is licensed separately again, and the fee depends on which council owns the pavement outside your door. We priced it in what an outdoor dining permit costs, where a 24 seat footpath at one Melbourne council works out near A$3,430 a year.
Licensing and loudness are two separate obligations and venues routinely confuse them. What happens when someone makes a noise complaint about your restaurant covers the Victorian 55 dB(A) night ceiling, why your day limit is not published anywhere, and who pays for attenuation when apartments go up next door.
Do I need a licence to play music in my restaurant? If the music is protected by copyright and the room is open to the public, yes, in both countries. OneMusic Australia calls this public performance and says it is legally different to playing music at home or in the car.
Does a weekend or public holiday surcharge affect any of this? No, they are unrelated regimes. The surcharge rules are consumer law and are covered on the public holiday surcharge page.
What about music in a social media post? OneMusic Australia states that non-personal or commercial use of music in a social or video post needs direct permission from the rights holders and is not covered by the licence.
Will the price go up? Yes, predictably. The Australian guide says the GST-exclusive component increases by CPI on 1 September each licence period. The New Zealand fact sheet says rates may increase in line with CPI each year.
Rates change and both organisations publish their own current fee guides, so check the figure against the source before you budget from it. This page is not legal advice.