Vietnam's food and beverage sector faces higher music licensing bills from July 1, when a revised minimum wage base takes effect and automatically lifts royalty calculations for cafes, restaurants, and other commercial venues. The change does not introduce a new legal obligation — that has existed for years — but it does push up the actual amounts owed, with annual fees capped at VND 20 million per venue in Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City.
How the Fee Formula Works
Under Appendix II of Decree 17/2023/NĐ-CP, as amended by Decree 134/2026/NĐ-CP issued in April 2026, music royalties are calculated using a straightforward multiplier: the statutory base salary multiplied by an adjustment coefficient. Because the base salary rises on July 1, the resulting royalty figure rises in step, even though the underlying formula stays unchanged. Venues in other provinces pay scaled amounts tied to their urban classification, meaning the burden varies significantly across the country.
Spotify Premium Is Not Enough
A widespread misconception among venue owners is that a personal streaming subscription covers commercial use. It does not. Spotify Premium, YouTube Premium, and similar services license music strictly for private listening. Their terms of service explicitly prohibit playback in cafes, restaurants, retail stores, gyms, or any commercially oriented space. The personal-use right and the public-performance right are separate, independent entitlements with different price points.
Ho Chi Minh City lawyer Hoàng Hà explains the distinction clearly: a streaming subscription grants access to a catalogue under the platform's own terms, nothing more. Once music plays in a room serving paying customers, it transitions from personal entertainment into a component of a commercial service — one that legally requires a separate licence.
Who Grants the Licence
Venue owners seeking compliance can approach two authorised intermediaries. The Vietnam Center for Protection of Music Copyright (VCPMC) handles author and copyright-owner rights across a large catalogue of domestic and international works. The Recording Industry Association of Vietnam (RIAV) covers neighbouring rights — primarily those of producers and performers tied to sound recordings. Both organisations can issue licences and collect fees on behalf of rights holders, giving small operators a practical single point of contact rather than requiring individual negotiations with every musician or label.
Penalties for Non-Compliance
Venues that begin playing music have a 90-day window to formalise their licence before the law treats continued playback as an infringement. Missing that deadline exposes individual owners to administrative fines of VND 10–15 million, while corporate entities face double that range. Importantly, the fine does not extinguish the underlying debt: operators must still pay all royalties owed for the period of unlicensed use, making delayed compliance more expensive than acting promptly.
Why Music Actually Matters to the Bottom Line
The commercial case for background music — and therefore for paying to use it properly — is well documented. A study published in the Journal of Consumer Research as far back as 1986 found that slower-tempo music in restaurants correlates with longer stays and higher beverage spending. Research from the University of Pretoria, surveying 120 cafe customers, found that most rated music as a meaningful driver of atmosphere. More recent work in service management emphasises that tempo, volume, and genre selection all influence mood and directly affect whether customers return or recommend a venue.
Large international coffee chains already invest in curated playlists as a brand management tool, treating sound as a marketing instrument rather than decoration. For Vietnam's increasingly competitive cafe market — where differentiation on drink quality alone is harder to sustain — the logic is similar. The royalty fee, capped at VND 20 million annually even for large Hanoi or HCMC venues, is modest relative to the revenue that a well-chosen soundtrack can support.
Investor and Operator Takeaway
For investors with exposure to Vietnam's food and beverage sector, the July 1 date is an administrative inflection point rather than a regulatory shock. The legal framework has been in place since the Intellectual Property Law and Decree 17/2023, and the incremental cost increase is limited. The more material risk is reputational and operational: venues that ignore the 90-day grace period face fines, mandatory playback suspension, and retroactive royalty liability. Operators who engage VCPMC or RIAV promptly convert a compliance headache into a predictable, deductible operating cost — and gain a defensible soundtrack for their brand in the process.
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