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PPL India Explained: Public Performance Licensing

Phonographic Performance Limited India (PPL India) is the collective rights organisation that licenses the public performance of sound recordings in India. Where IPRS represents the songwriters, PPL represents the recording side — the labels that own the masters. If a restaurant, hotel, retail store, event, or radio station plays recorded music in public, it generally needs a PPL licence for the recording, in addition to any IPRS licence for the underlying song. Two different rights, two different licences.

What PPL does

PPL India, founded in 1941, licenses its member labels' sound recordings for public performance and radio broadcast, collects the fees, and distributes the proceeds to its member labels. It represents around 500 music labels, including T-Series, Sony Music, Universal Music, Warner Music India, Times Music, Lahari Music, and Aditya Music, with a repertoire of more than a crore of domestic and international recordings across languages including Hindi, English, Marathi, Punjabi, Tamil, Telugu, and Bengali.

The registration saga

Under Section 33 of the Copyright Act, 1957, only a registered copyright society may carry on the business of issuing licences for copyrighted works. For years, PPL operated without that registration, and many commercial users withheld licence fees on those grounds. The Delhi High Court held that PPL could not issue public-performance licences as an unregistered body. That uncertainty ended on June 11, 2026, when the Government of India granted PPL registration as a copyright society — reinstating it after a 12-year absence — giving its licensing a clear statutory framework.

Who needs a PPL licence

Any business that plays recorded music in public generally needs one: hotels, restaurants, cafes, retail outlets, malls, offices, event organisers, and radio broadcasters. Playing music from a personal streaming subscription in a commercial space does not cover you — personal subscriptions are for private listening, and commercial use requires proper licences. Venues that skip licensing face legal action and backdated claims.

What it means for artists

If you are signed to a label that is a PPL member, your recordings' public-performance royalties flow through your label under your deal. If you are an independent artist who owns your masters, you are not automatically part of PPL's collection — PPL represents labels, not individual independent artists. That is one more reason to understand exactly which rights your distributor and your deals do and do not cover.

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