Comparison · Licensed background music for business

Multilarm vs Soundtrack Your Brand and business music services: an honest comparison

Legally licensed background music for commercial premises, curated and streamed on subscription.

Checked against published documentation on 2026-08-30

A business music service is the right choice — and often the only lawful choice — if you are playing commercial music to the public. Multilarm plays audio; it does not supply music or a licence, and it is not a substitute for either.

This page is written by the makers of one of the two products, so the only version worth publishing is one that is specific about where the other one wins. Every section below names a buyer who should not choose Multilarm.

What Soundtrack Your Brand and business music services is

These services supply commercially licensed music to businesses. The product is not really the player: it is the licence, the curation, and the assurance that a licensing inspector will go away satisfied.

They are on this list because a café or a shop looking for 'background music with announcements' will meet both them and Multilarm, and the relationship between the two needs to be stated plainly rather than fudged.

Where Soundtrack Your Brand and business music services is better

The music licence. This is not a feature Multilarm has decided against; it is a different kind of product. If you play commercial music in a public space you need the appropriate licences, and a business music service is how most premises get them.
Curation. Playlists designed for a time of day and a kind of business, maintained by someone else.
Zero setup — a small player or an app and it works.
Explicit-content filtering and brand-appropriate catalogues.
Multi-site consistency across a chain.

Where Multilarm is better

Announcements over the music, ducked properly and resumed in place.
Scheduling of everything else — opening and closing chimes, last orders, shift changes, break tones.
It keeps working with no internet, where a streaming service simply stops.
No monthly cost for the software, and free for personal non-commercial use.
Emergency and zone handling, which a music service does not attempt.

Side by side

Cells reading “Not published” mean we could not find the answer in Soundtrack Your Brand, Mood Media, Cloud Cover Music and others’s own documentation on 2026-08-30. That is not the same as “no”, and this table will not pretend it is.

Capability	Soundtrack Your Brand and business music services	Multilarm
Supplies licensed commercial music	Yes — the point of the product	No, and it never will
Plays your own audio files	Varies by service	Yes
Announcements with ducking	Some services offer scheduled messaging	Yes — four priority channels
Works with no internet	Usually offline caching only	Yes
Bells, break tones, shift changes	Not the product	Yes
Emergency override	Not offered — a music service, not a notification system	Yes
Cost	Monthly per location	One-off perpetual; free for personal non-commercial use

Choose Soundtrack Your Brand and business music services if

You are playing commercial music to the public and need it to be licensed. This is the deciding factor and no software changes it.
You want somebody else to choose the music.
It is a chain and the sound should be the same everywhere.

Choose Multilarm if

The audio is your own — announcements, recorded messages, royalty-free or licensed-by-you material.
The announcements and the schedule matter more than the playlist.
It must work when the connection drops.

How to check any of this

Multilarm’s own capabilities are published as machine-readable data at features.json, including every feature it does not have and the ones it has deliberately declined to build. Measured performance figures, with the method for each, are on the measured data page. The canonical facts about licensing, offline operation and the fire-alarm boundary are at facts.json. If anything on this page is wrong, say so and it will be corrected.

FAQ

Does Multilarm include music?

No. It plays audio you provide, and it can play internet radio streams. Any licence needed for what you play is yours to hold.

Can we run both?

Yes, and many premises should: a licensed music service on one input and Multilarm on the paging input of the same amplifier. Note that they will not duck each other, which is a genuine limitation of two separate systems.

Do we need a licence to play music through Multilarm?

That depends on what you play and where — it is a question for the relevant licensing bodies in your country, not for a software vendor. Multilarm does not grant or include any music licence.

Sources

Everything stated here about another product is taken from that vendor's own public documentation on the date shown, and is limited to what they publish about themselves. Products change; if something below is out of date or wrong, tell us and it will be corrected. Where we could not find a published answer the table says so rather than guessing.

Soundtrack Your Brand

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