Walk into almost any hotel lobby, café, or shopping mall in India, and you'll hear music playing. Bollywood tracks, old classics, the latest chart-toppers, it's the invisible wallpaper of Indian commercial life. For years, though, the artists and labels behind that music were getting almost nothing in return. Not because businesses refused to pay, but because the law gave them a convenient excuse not to.
That excuse officially ran out on June 11, 2026.
On that date, the Registrar of Copyrights, Prof (Dr) Unnat P Pandit, issued a Certificate of Registration to Phonographic Performance Limited (PPL India) as a Copyright Society under the Copyright Act, 1957. It was issued through the Department for Promotion of Industry and Internal Trade (DPIIT), under the Ministry of Commerce and Industry. The certificate itself is a few lines on government paper — but what it represents for India's music ecosystem is far bigger than that.
A Crisis That Was Hidden in Plain Sight
PPL India isn't a new organisation. It was founded in 1941, older than India's independence, and for decades it operated as the primary body managing public performance rights for sound recordings. Hotels, restaurants, gyms, radio stations, and event organisers were required to take licences from PPL before playing recorded music commercially. Most did, some didn't, and the industry chugged along.
Then came the Copyright (Amendment) Act of 2012. The amendments strengthened protections for authors and performers, but buried in the fine print was a requirement: all existing societies managing copyright had to seek fresh registration under the new framework. PPL's registration eventually lapsed, and that lapse opened a legal wound that would take over a decade to close.
With PPL no longer holding a valid copyright society registration, commercial users of music — businesses that were perfectly happy playing Arijit Singh at their hotel receptions — suddenly had a legal argument: they weren't obligated to pay licence fees to a body that wasn't officially recognised under the law. Courts, at various points, sided with this view. PPL continued to issue licences and collect royalties where it could, but its authority was disputed at every turn. Many businesses simply stopped paying.
The ones who suffered most weren't the executives or the large labels. It was the artists; singers, musicians, performers whose royalties depend entirely on the licensing machinery functioning correctly.
The Numbers Behind the Music
PPL India represents nearly 500 Indian and international music labels, including T-Series, Sony Music India, Universal Music India, Times Music, Lahari Music, and Aditya Music. Its catalogue is one of the largest collections of recorded music in the country. For context, if a restaurant in Hyderabad plays a Telugu film song during dinner service, that song almost certainly falls under PPL's purview.
In a country where music is played at temples, weddings, malls, gyms, corporate offices, airports, and street corners, the scale of unlicensed public performance is hard to overstate. Every song played without a licence is a royalty not received. Multiply that across thousands of commercial establishments, millions of daily plays, and over a decade of legal limbo, and the figure in lost artist earnings runs into the hundreds of crores.
PPL India itself has acknowledged this plainly. As it noted in a statement following the registration: "For several years, many commercial users of music withheld payment of legitimate licence fees on the ground that PPL was not registered as a Copyright Society. As a consequence, copyright owners represented by PPL, and the artists associated with their recordings, were deprived of royalties arising from the commercial use of their music."
That sentence deserves to sit with the reader for a moment. Not a legal technicality, not a procedural delay: artists were actively deprived of income they had earned.
What Changes Now
With the new registration under Section 33(3) of the Copyright Act, PPL India can now function with full statutory authority. It can formally issue licences, publish tariff schedules, collect royalty fees, and distribute those fees to the labels and artists it represents after deducting administrative costs. More importantly, businesses can no longer use the "PPL isn't registered" defence to avoid paying for the music they use commercially.
PPL's statement on the registration was direct: it "expects businesses and establishments using copyrighted sound recordings without authorisation to regularise such usage by obtaining the required licences and paying applicable licence fees."
For G.B. Aayeer, Managing Director and CEO of PPL India, the registration closes a chapter that should have never been as long as it was. "This registration marks an important milestone for PPL India and the music labels we represent," he said. "We are deeply grateful to the Government of India, particularly DPIIT, for recognising our commitment to transparent, efficient, and equitable rights management."
The Business Owner's New Reality
For anyone running a commercial space that plays music — and in India, that is nearly every commercial space — this development carries a practical implication. The legal ambiguity that allowed many to look the other way is gone.
A restaurant owner in Mumbai, a hotel chain in Bengaluru, a gym in Delhi — all will now find PPL's licensing authority backed by clear law. PPL's licensing process has, in recent years, become more streamlined. Businesses can get in touch, have their venue assessed, and receive a licence invoice accordingly. The cost varies by type and size of establishment, but it is the cost of using someone else's creative work for commercial gain — the same logic that governs any business input.
This also brings India more in line with global norms. In the UK, PRS for Music and PPL UK jointly administer public performance rights. In the US, ASCAP, BMI, and SoundExchange play similar roles. Robust collective management of music rights is the backbone of a functioning creative economy. India, with its massive and growing music industry, has long needed this clarity.
The Bigger Picture: India's Creative Economy Cannot Afford Half-Measures
India is frequently described as one of the fastest-growing music markets in the world. Streaming numbers are up, live events are booming, and film music is a global cultural export. But a creative economy is only as strong as its ability to compensate the people who create for it.
The years of uncertainty around PPL's status were a symptom of a deeper problem: intellectual property law in India, while comprehensive on paper, has often struggled in enforcement and implementation. Musicians, especially those who aren't marquee names, have little power to individually chase down royalties. That's precisely why collective management societies exist to do it on their behalf.
The June 11 registration is not just good news for PPL or the labels it represents. It is good news for the session musician whose guitar riff plays in a hotel bar in Goa. It is good news for the folk singer from Rajasthan whose adapted recording gets looped in a boutique resort's playlist. It is good news for every creator whose work travels further than they ever could and who deserved to be paid for that journey.
India's music plays everywhere. Now, finally, the people who made it might actually get paid everywhere too.
