This question arrives about once a month, usually from someone in procurement or legal who has been asked to approve a DJ as a vendor and wants to know what the company is signing up for. The short version: at an established venue, the music is normally covered by a license the venue already holds, the DJ plays from music he has bought, and the company hosting the party is rarely the party that needs to hold anything. The longer version has some real nuance, and one caveat that belongs at the top. We are a DJ company, not a law firm. What follows is how the system works in practice as we understand it after 14 years of playing rooms in New Jersey and Manhattan. It is not legal advice. If your legal team needs certainty for a specific situation, ask a lawyer who handles copyright.
Who licenses music for a party in the first place
In the United States, songwriters and publishers are paid for public performances of their work through performing rights organizations, the PROs. The ones you will see named are ASCAP, BMI, SESAC and GMR. They sell blanket licenses that allow a business to play essentially any song in their catalogs, and they collect and distribute the money.
The word that matters is public. A company party is invitation-only, but the exemption in copyright law for private performances is narrow, roughly a normal circle of family and social acquaintances. Two hundred employees and their guests in a hotel ballroom does not generally fit inside it. So the music at a company party is usually treated as a public performance, and somebody is expected to hold a license for it.
In practice, that somebody is the place. Hotels, restaurants, bars, catering halls, museums with event programs and dedicated event venues typically pay annual blanket licenses to the PROs because music is played in their rooms every week. The license attaches to the room, not to the person pressing play. This is the reason a DJ can walk into a venue that had a different DJ the night before and a live band the night before that, and nobody files anything. It is also why, when a client's legal department asks us for "our music license," what we send instead is a certificate of insurance and a written statement of where our music comes from. There is no general DJ-specific public performance license in the US that a mobile DJ holds for playing at a licensed venue, as far as we have ever been asked to produce one.
What the DJ is responsible for
The DJ's obligation is on the other side of the transaction: the copies. Every track in a working DJ's library should be a legally acquired file. Ours come from three places. Download stores that sell DJ-grade files. Record pools, which are subscription services the record labels use to distribute promotional copies and clean edits to working DJs, and which are the same source radio stations get their edits from. And music we bought on physical media years ago and ripped ourselves. Buying a copy does not license a public performance; that remains the venue's blanket license. What it does is make the copy itself legitimate, which is the thing a DJ can actually control.
Streaming is where a lot of confusion lives. Consumer services such as Spotify and Apple Music are licensed for personal, non-commercial use, and their terms of service say so. Playing a consumer streaming account through a PA at a paid event is a terms-of-service problem before it is anything else, separate from the copyright question the venue's license addresses. A few DJ-oriented streaming tiers exist that are built for performance use, and some DJs use them as a supplement for a request they do not own. We treat any streaming source as a backup for a single request, never as the library, for reasons that are mostly about reliability rather than law. That reasoning is its own post.
Where it gets less clear
The clean case is a party at a venue that hosts events for a living. The situations below are the ones where we tell clients to ask their own counsel, because the answer depends on facts we do not have.
- A party in your own office. There is no venue license, because you are the venue. Companies that play music regularly, in lobbies, at recurring events, in retail spaces, often hold their own PRO licenses, and some do not. If your office hosts a few parties a year, this is a question for whoever handles your licensing, not for the DJ. The practical side of an office party, power and neighbors and sound, is covered in a separate post.
- Outdoor and street events. A brand activation on a plaza or a picnic in a public park usually involves a permit, and the permit holder or the organizer typically handles whatever music licensing the space requires. We ask who that is during planning so it is not discovered on the day.
- Video of the party. Recording the dance floor and posting it with the music audible involves a different right, synchronization, and each platform handles it differently. This is entirely outside what a DJ can help with. Your marketing team probably already has a view on it.
- Streaming the event to remote employees. A live feed of the party to another office is a performance over the internet, which is its own category. Some companies already have licensing for internal broadcasts. Most do not think to ask, and it is worth a question before the AV team plugs the feed in.
What to ask, and who to ask
Three questions cover almost every company party, and each goes to a different person.
- Ask the venue whether they hold performing rights licenses that cover private events in the room you are renting. Most established event venues will say yes without hesitation. We do not assert anything about a specific venue's license, because it is their license and their answer to give. If a venue seems unsure, that is useful information on its own.
- Ask the DJ where the music comes from. The answer you want is purchased downloads and record-pool files stored on local drives, with clean edits sourced from the same places radio gets them. If the answer is a phone and a streaming app, you have learned something about reliability as well as licensing. More of these questions are in what to ask a corporate DJ.
- Ask your own legal or facilities team only if the party is in a space your company controls, will be recorded for public use, or will be streamed. For a party at a hotel or restaurant, this step is usually unnecessary.
One last practical note. Vendor onboarding forms at large companies sometimes include a checkbox for "music licensing" that nobody on the procurement side can explain. When that happens, we provide a short written statement describing our music sources and the fact that public performance at the venue is covered by the venue's licensing, and that has been enough every time it has come up. If your form needs something more specific, send it to us and we will tell you what we can and cannot sign.
Checking a date
If you are at the stage of confirming a vendor, the useful things to send are the date, the venue and a rough headcount. From those we can confirm availability, tell you which package fits, and flag anything the venue is likely to ask for, insurance included. Use the contact page or call (201) 705-3139. We reply within 24 hours.