Can businesses legally use AI-generated background music?
If you’ve looked into background music for a shop, café, or restaurant before, you’ve probably run into Koda or Gramex — Denmark’s performing rights organisations — somewhere in the process. That’s usually the point where a simple decision (“what should we play?”) turns into a licensing question. AI-generated music changes that equation, but it’s worth understanding exactly how, rather than taking a marketing claim at face value.
What the licence is actually for
A performing rights licence like Koda’s isn’t a general “permission to play music” fee — it’s a mechanism for paying the people who hold copyright in a specific recording and composition when that recording is played in public. Koda collects on behalf of songwriters and composers; Gramex collects on behalf of performers and record labels. Both exist because the underlying works are protected by copyright, and a business playing them commercially is a public performance that copyright law accounts for.
That system makes complete sense for a shop playing existing commercial tracks — a curated playlist of released songs, a streaming service’s radio feature, or a burned CD all involve music someone else holds rights to.
Why AI-generated music is a different starting point
FeelFlow Radio doesn’t select or stream existing recordings. Every track is generated for the listener, not licensed, sampled, or reused from a catalogue of released music. There’s no underlying commercial recording being publicly performed — the thing a Koda or Gramex licence exists to cover simply isn’t present in the same way.
That’s a real structural difference, not a workaround. But it deserves an honest caveat: generative-AI music and copyright is a genuinely new area, and Koda’s and Gramex’s own official positions on AI-generated audio aren’t something we can state on their behalf. Our own read — echoed in the FAQ on our business page — is that generated tracks with no underlying licensed recording don’t trigger a reporting obligation under this model. That’s our interpretation, not a guarantee, a legal ruling, or advice we can give for your specific situation. If your business wants certainty rather than our interpretation, the accurate path is to ask Koda or Gramex directly, or check with your own advisor — we’d rather say that plainly than overstate what we can promise.
What this means in practice for a shop
Setting the legal framing aside, here’s the concrete difference it makes day to day: there’s one subscription, one price, and nothing else to arrange. No separate licensing conversation, no second contract with a music-service provider to keep in sync with the first, and no annual Koda renewal to track alongside it. That operational simplicity is a direct consequence of the same fact discussed above — there’s no separate rights-holder relationship to manage because there’s no existing recording being licensed.
It also shows up in the price, because the traditional route bundles two real costs that a generated-music approach doesn’t have to carry:
| FeelFlow Radio | Traditional (Koda + music service) | |
|---|---|---|
| Monthly cost, 240 m² | 46,78 € | 61,80 € (Koda) + ~26,81 € (typical music service) = ~88,61 € |
That’s roughly a 47% difference at 240 m², and it holds at larger sizes too — a full breakdown by floor area, including how each side’s rate is built, is in AI music vs. traditional background music: what it actually costs a shop. (The Koda figure uses their published tariff structure; the music-service figure is a conservative mid-range estimate, since actual provider pricing varies. FeelFlow Radio’s own price is fixed and calculated automatically for your space.)
What it doesn’t mean
Worth being precise about the limits here, since this is exactly the kind of claim that’s easy to overstate: this isn’t a blanket exemption from every music-licensing consideration a business might have, and it isn’t legal advice for your specific premises, region, or use case. If your business already has an existing Koda/Gramex account for other purposes, or plays music through channels beyond FeelFlow Radio, those obligations are unaffected by anything here. This article describes how our own service is structured and our own understanding of why — it’s not a substitute for checking your own situation if you need to be certain.
Setting it up
If the structure above fits what you’re looking for, getting started doesn’t require a legal review on your end — it’s the same three steps regardless: sign in with a Google account, look up the business, and confirm the location’s floor area. The price is calculated automatically from that one number, and the station starts. No separate licensing application, no waiting on a third party’s approval process.
For the mechanics of how a station is actually built — genre, language, mood, and why nothing repeats — see how does AI radio work?. For the atmosphere case for choosing generated music over a curated playlist in the first place, see how background music affects a store’s atmosphere. And the business page has the full FAQ, including this question, alongside the pricing calculator for your own space.