Guide

Tech Tuesdays: Music for Business with QSC Q-SYS

This week we’re revisiting music for business, and specifically, Perfect Octave’s custom integration with QSC Q-SYS.

Nearly everyone has heard music in some form of business, whether that be in retail, in a restaurant or a hotel. But perhaps what is not known, is how that music is picked, played, delivered and licensed (or not as the case may be).

Business owners tend to know well that they need a licence to play music in a public space. In the UK, these licences come from PRS and PPL. These organisations came together not too long ago to offer a single licence, called ‘TheMusicLicence’ to play music to the public in a business setting. These licence costs are often based on the type of business and size of the property.

What is less known, but is equally as important, is that these aren’t the only licences that are required to play music in a business! You may be forgiven for thinking that playing music from well known streaming platforms in your venue is perfectly fine. However, the terms and conditions of these platforms will strictly dictate that the playback is for personal use only, not for businesses.

The reason for this is that business music providers such as Perfect Octave pay what’s called an MSB2B licence, which allows them to create digital databases of audio and to distribute that audio specifically for background music playback in businesses. These licence fees ultimately go to the artists, composers and publishers who would otherwise not be fully compensated for the use of their content.

So how do Perfect Octave provide that music to your audio system? They have various methods, either playing back using an iOS or Android application, on a Chrome browser, on their own dedicated player for single zone applications and recently, through a dedicated integration with QSC Q-SYS, available in the UK from Audiologic.

This integration, using the power of Q-SYS, allows for up to 12 zones of independent music, to be played back completely digitally within a Core. There are no media players and no input cards required and it takes just minutes to implement! This is a perfect fit on any Core available today, especially the newest Core 8 Flex or Core Nano, where network inputs are favoured over analogue.

For each zone of music on the Core, you have a choice of genre and particular station of music you would like to play, or you can even build your own mixes from different stations, and then schedule those music styles to play at different times of the day, each day of the week. These schedules can be changed for all the locations you manage, from wherever you are using any web browser, with no need to access the Q-SYS Core or the site itself.

There are over 370 different stations of music, based on over 60 million tracks available – and that number is increasing every day. If you would rather bring in a playlist you already have from another streaming platform, Perfect Octave’s support team can assist with ingesting that list onto your device ready to play, mix and schedule as you see fit.

Perfect Octave on Q-SYS is currently operating at a number of very well-known locations both in the UK, and internationally and has been proven to save on cost and time of implementation as well as provide easy to use controls and visibility of playback. In addition, integrators have found they have far less support issues and are able to offer a full turn-key audio solution to their clients.

To learn more about music licensing for businesses, check out prsformusic.com, and to learn more about Perfect Octave and Q-SYS, reach out to [email protected] or give us a call on the office line.