Do you need a licence to start an internet radio station?

It’s the first question almost everyone asks before pressing Start: am I actually allowed to do this? The honest answer is the least satisfying kind — it depends on what you play. If your station plays commercial music, yes, you need licences, and they’re far more attainable than most beginners fear. If it’s pure talk, or entirely music you made yourself, you may not need any at all. This guide is a plain-English map of that territory: what the licences cover, who collects the money, and what to sort out before your first broadcast.

1. The short answer

If you play music you didn’t create — anything commercial, from chart hits to obscure vinyl rips — you need licences before you broadcast it. That’s true even for an audience of three, even if you never make a cent, and even if you bought every album legally. Buying a song licenses you to *listen* to it; playing it to the public is a separate right called a public performance, and an internet stream counts as one. There is no hobbyist exemption and no “it’s only online” loophole.

If your station is pure talk — sports commentary, news, religious teaching, comedy, interviews — you don’t need a music licence, because you’re not using anyone else’s music. The same goes if you exclusively play your own recordings, or music explicitly licensed to you (royalty-free libraries, direct permission from independent artists). A huge number of stations fall into these categories and broadcast entirely legally without ever dealing with a collecting society.

2. The two copyrights in every song

Here’s the piece of theory that makes everything else make sense: every recorded song carries two separate copyrights, usually owned by different people.

• The composition — the notes and lyrics as written. This belongs to the songwriter and their publisher.
• The sound recording — one particular performance of that composition, captured in the studio. This “master” typically belongs to the performing artist or their label.

Think of *Yesterday*. The composition is Paul McCartney’s; the 1965 Beatles recording is one sound recording of it, and every cover version since is another. When you broadcast a track, you’re using both copyrights at once — the song and the recording of it — and licensing one does not license the other. That’s why the money flows to two different places, which brings us to who you actually pay.

3. Who you actually pay

The good news: you don’t negotiate with labels or songwriters one by one. Collecting societies exist precisely so a small broadcaster can buy blanket licences — one agreement that covers millions of songs at once. In the United States, webcasters typically deal with two kinds of organisation:

• For the composition: the performing rights organisations — ASCAP, BMI and SESAC (plus GMR for a smaller catalogue). Each represents a different slice of songwriters, so music stations generally need licences from more than one.
• For the sound recording: SoundExchange, which administers the statutory licence that lets non-interactive webcasters play recordings without asking each label individually — and distributes the royalties to artists and labels.

Outside the US the structure rhymes even where the names differ. In the UK it’s PRS for Music for the composition and PPL for the recording; most countries have equivalent bodies, and in some a single society handles both. The general rule is to licence with the societies in the country you broadcast from — they can tell you whether your audience elsewhere is covered by reciprocal agreements. When in doubt, ask them directly; answering exactly this question is what they exist for.

4. What it actually costs — real numbers, dated

Most guides stop at "rates vary". Here are the actual published US numbers as of August 2026, with one honest warning attached: rates change, categories matter enormously, and the societies' own sites are the only source that counts on the day you sign. Treat this table as scale, not gospel.

A "performance" means one song delivered to one listener — so the math scales with audience, not with how big your library is. Worked example: a station averaging one listener around the clock streams roughly 720 listener-hours a month; at ~15 songs an hour that's about 10,800 performances, or ~$27/month at the pure-play rate. Which reveals the number that actually matters for small stations: below roughly three around-the-clock average listeners, the $1,000 annual minimum is what you're really paying, not the per-song rate. Budget the minimums first; the meter only overtakes them as you grow.

Outside the US, the same two-copyright structure prices differently in every territory. The general rule: you licence where your listeners are, which is why geofencing exists and why "worldwide coverage" claims deserve scrutiny. Where the entry points live, by country:

5. The playout rules that come with the licence

The US statutory licence for sound recordings isn’t just a payment — it comes with conditions on how you programme music, designed to keep a radio-style stream from becoming a free substitute for owning the songs. The core rules, known formally as the sound recording performance complement, boil down to this in plain English:

• In any rolling three-hour window, play no more than 4 tracks by the same artist — and no more than 3 of them back-to-back…
• …and no more than 3 tracks from the same album, with no more than 2 of those consecutively.
• Don’t pre-announce — no publishing the exact time a specific song will play, so the stream can’t be used as an on-demand jukebox.

Break those rules and you drift outside the statutory licence — the stream becomes “interactive” in the law’s eyes, which requires direct deals with labels. The catch is that nobody can hold these limits in their head while programming a station, which is why they’re a job for software: Cloud AutoDJ enforces the performance complement automatically. The sequencer simply won’t schedule a fifth track by the same artist, or a fourth from the same album, inside any rolling three-hour window. You build the playlists; the rules are handled.

The other half of compliance is reporting — the societies want to know what you actually played so the right artists get paid. Your stream carries artist and title metadata on every track, so a proper play log exists to report from. How to keep that metadata clean and turn your play history into a royalty report is its own guide: now-playing branding and royalty reports.

6. What if you only play your own music?

If you wrote it, performed it and recorded it, you hold both copyrights — and you don’t need anyone’s permission to broadcast your own work. The same logic covers genuinely royalty-free libraries and independent artists who’ve given you direct permission, with two caveats worth reading twice:

• “Royalty-free” is a marketing term, not a legal category. Read the actual licence — some allow broadcast, some only allow use in videos, and some Creative Commons variants prohibit commercial use entirely.
• A cover version is only half yours. If you record yourself playing someone else’s song, you own the new sound recording — but the composition still belongs to its writer, and broadcasting it still needs a composition licence.

In Nobex, tracks you hold the rights to get a per-track “I own this recording” flag. Marking a track exempts it from the sequencer’s performance-complement limits — sensible, since the rules exist to protect *other people’s* recordings, and there’s no reason the system should stop you playing your own album back to back.

7. Podcasts and on-demand are a different licence

This one catches nearly everyone. The licences above cover live, radio-style streaming — a continuous programme the listener tunes into but doesn’t control. The moment you record a show and offer it on demand — as a podcast episode, a download, a “listen again” archive — you’re in different legal territory, and your streaming licences don’t follow you there.

On-demand use of commercial music requires separate rights cleared per track, negotiated directly with the rights holders — there’s no blanket licence to buy. In practice that makes music podcasts impractical for small broadcasters, which is why almost every station handles it the same way: podcast the talk shows, not the music shows. An interview, a sports phone-in or a news round-up is yours to publish anywhere; the same episode with three chart songs in it is not. If you record your live shows for release, plan the music-free segments with that in mind.

8. A practical getting-started checklist

1. 1Decide what you’ll play. Pure talk or fully-owned music: no licence needed — skip to step 5. Commercial music: carry on.
2. 2Find your societies. In the US, that’s SoundExchange plus the performing rights organisations (ASCAP, BMI, SESAC); in the UK, PRS for Music and PPL; elsewhere, search “music licensing for webcasters” plus your country and start with the official bodies.
3. 3Ask for their small-webcaster or online-radio licence and tell them honestly what you plan to do — hours of music, expected audience, commercial or hobby. The paperwork is more form-filling than negotiation.
4. 4Keep your library tags clean — artist, title and album on every track — so your play history is fit for royalty reporting from day one.
5. 5Mark the recordings you own with the “I own this recording” flag, so the sequencer rules apply only where the law does.
6. 6Keep podcasts talk-only unless you’ve cleared on-demand rights for every piece of music in the episode.

9. Licensing, asked and answered