Do you need a music license for your UAE venue? What's actually known.

What has changed since 2025

Since 2025, collecting societies in the UAE are licensed by the state to manage music rights. State licensing means the societies operate with an official mandate — the same model most countries use for public-performance royalties.

Inspections of venues have been announced. What an inspection will check, and which documents a venue is expected to show, has not been spelled out in public guidance yet.

Tariffs for background music have not been published. Until they are, nobody can tell a café what a year of repertoire music will cost — that is the open question this page exists to track.

What a society license will cover

Collecting societies license music from their repertoire — that's how the system works everywhere, and the UAE follows the same logic. Radio, streaming services, commercial playlists: when tariffs arrive, that music will need a license, at rates nobody yet knows.

The other option: music outside the repertoire

The Oktava catalog is original work the service creates itself and not transferred to any collecting society — in the UAE or elsewhere. Whatever the tariffs turn out to be, they will be about repertoire music; the subscription price is Oktava's whole cost. The certificate (in English and Arabic), staff memo and playback log come with every account — documents an inspector can check on the spot via QR.

Ramadan mode

Quieter daytime channels for the holy month, one switch in the dashboard. It's a small thing, but venues asked, so we built it.

Questions, answered