There are music performance licenses for venues, such as restaurants and bars. People will come up to you and threaten to sue if you don't pay for a blanket lic

There are music performance licenses for venues, such as restaurants and bars. People will come up to you and threaten to sue if you don't pay for a blanket license. And they will do this even if you insist on playing completely original music. Many of these license fees are done in bulk. The same with countries that automatically collect a tax on USB sticks and optical media. You pay a volume license, but it never filters down to the artists because it's not collected based on which songs are actually stored or played. This is hardly all of it. There's a huge mass of corruption under the surface. Such as them not actually forwarding over license fees for song collections, or including songs they don't actually have the rights to include.