Your shop needs music. Easy, right? Plug in your phone, hit play, done. You already pay for unlimited streaming, so everything should be taken care of.
It isn't.
The short answer
Spotify's own help page says it plainly: the service is for personal, non-commercial use only, so you can't play it publicly from a business like a bar, restaurant, store or salon. Other personal streaming apps have similar terms, so check yours.
What's going on is licensing. Your membership covers you, the individual listener. It doesn't cover your business playing music for a room full of customers. That's a different kind of license, and it comes from different services.
Why anyone cares
Songwriters and publishers get paid when their music is played in public, and organizations collect that money on their behalf. In the US the big ones are BMI, ASCAP, SESAC and GMR, and each covers a different catalog.
They do enforce. It might start with a letter. Under US copyright law, statutory damages generally run $750 to $30,000 per song, and up to $150,000 per song if a court finds the infringement was willful. (I'm a musician, not a lawyer, so treat this as background, not legal advice.)
Will it happen to you? They have to find you first, and how much risk you're comfortable with is your call. I'd just say it's a real risk, not an imaginary one, and the people on the other end are songwriters trying to get paid for their work.
Who's on the other end
Here's the part that matters to me. If you run a small independent business, you know what it's like to depend on people paying you what you're owed. Songwriters and artists, and the small teams around them, are small independent businesses too.
When your shop plays music through a licensed service, money flows back to them. These services license recordings directly from labels and publishers, and they pay public performance royalties through those same organizations. Soundtrack's CEO has said a business subscription costs five to ten times what a personal one does, and pays six to ten times more in royalties. That's the company's own number, so take it as theirs. But the direction is clear: more money reaches the people who make the music.
Pay the humans.
That money is part of what lets working musicians keep making records. It's a more direct way to back real artists than any slogan.
What to do instead
A handful of services are built for businesses: Soundtrack Your Brand, Pandora CloudCover, SoundMachine and others. They're more alike than different. They handle the licensing, let you schedule music for different times of day, come with ready-made playlists much like the ones on Spotify, and are easy to use. Pandora leans into its internet-radio roots, so instead of a playlist you pick a station. They cost a little more per month than a personal subscription, and that extra is what you're paying to be properly covered.
One thing to know: even a licensed service has limits. Live bands, DJs, karaoke and venues that charge admission usually need extra permissions. If you run a bar with live music, ask what your service covers instead of assuming everything's handled.
Full disclosure
I use Soundtrack Your Brand, and I'm a partner, so weigh my opinion accordingly. I chose it because it lets me connect my work directly to a client's account, so there's nothing for them to set up. That's about my workflow, not a claim that it's the only good option.
What to do this week
Check what you're playing right now. If it's a personal account, look at one of these services and start a free trial if they offer one. It takes about as long as making a new playlist, and you'll be playing music you're actually allowed to play.
If you'd like help deciding what that music should sound like, that's what I do.