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THE LEAD
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From 1 December, playing music in your café costs a licence fee
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| The music in your local café is about to carry a price tag. From 1 December, any UAE business that plays copyrighted music for customers needs an annual licence and pays a set fee. The Ministry of Economy and Tourism published the fee guide on 11 August, so that's the document to read. Two bodies, the Emirates Music Rights Association and Music Nation, will issue the licences and collect the money. A business picks one of them; it doesn't need both. And a personal streaming subscription doesn't count: the guide says it gives a shop no right to play songs to the public. |
| The fees scale with size, so here's how the tiers run. A restaurant or café with up to 50 seats pays Dh1,500 a year; 51 to 100 seats, Dh2,700; 101 to 200 seats, Dh4,800; beyond that, Dh20 per seat up to a Dh6,000 ceiling. That's the base rate. Add a DJ or live music and the same seat bands run from Dh2,500 to a Dh8,000 cap. It doesn't stop at hospitality: a shop pays Dh1,700 up to 300 square metres and Dh3,400 up to 700. A gym pays Dh1,700 for its first 300 square metres plus Dh5 for every metre after, capped at Dh6,000. Hotels pay Dh50 to Dh150 per room by star rating, capped at Dh25,000, and malls top out at Dh50,000. Ten percent of everything collected goes to a Cultural Support Fund for Music. Schools and universities, government bodies, national occasions and private non-commercial celebrations are exempt. |
| If you run a venue, the job this month is arithmetic. Count your seats or measure your floor, find your tier, and put the number in the December budget next to the trade licence and the DEWA bill. Then pick a licensing body and register before 1 December; the licence is annual, so it's a line item from now on. If you don't run a venue, expect the cost to surface quietly. Dh1,500 on a 40-seat café isn't much next to its other fixed costs, but it's one more, and it lands just as menus and gym rates get their new-year review. |
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WHAT TO DO
If you run a café, restaurant, shop, gym or hotel: find your seat count or floor area in the tiers above, budget the annual fee, and contact the Emirates Music Rights Association or Music Nation before 1 December. If you don't, there's nothing to do yet.
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