eli5: How does the licensing of music work? What are the prices like? Do you pay once for infinite uses?

Question

eli5: How does the licensing of music work? What are the prices like? Do you pay once for infinite uses?

In: 22

Answer 1

To have one concrete example: For Germany the GEMA organization acts as the official middle man between music rights holders on one side and companies that license the music and individuals that play music on the other side.

They have lots of different licenses depending on whether you want to play licensed music at an outside event, in your cáfe, on the radio or whatever. For internet streaming like Spotify or Apple music the conditions are [here](https://www.gema.de/fileadmin/user_upload/dokumente/musiknutzer/tarife/Tarife_VRA/tarif_vr_od8.pdf) and it’s 0.75€ to 1.75€ per end-user per month, but at least 15% of what the user pays, so for a Spotify fee of 9.99€ per month it’s at least 1.50€ per month of fee.