Monkey Music Franchise | Bring the Joy of Music to Your Community

The UK's Leading Pre-School Music Franchise

The Monkey Music Franchise is one of the UK's most loved and longest-established children's activity franchises. Since opening its doors in 1993, it has brought music into the lives of hundreds of thousands of young families, teaching 12,000 babies and children every week across more than 300 venues.

Music, Development and a Business You Can Be Proud Of

Monkey Music classes are built around a world-class curriculum of nearly 500 original songs and musical activities, designed by teachers, musicians and child development experts. Classes are tailored to four distinct age groups, from three months to four years, helping babies and toddlers develop language skills, emotional intelligence and a lifelong love of music.

As a Monkey Music Franchise owner, you have two routes: teach some or all of your own classes while growing your business, or invest in a fully management-based model from day one and employ qualified teachers to deliver the curriculum. The flexibility of the model is one of its greatest strengths, allowing franchisees to build the business around their lifestyle and ambitions.

Inside a Monkey Music class - franchisees can teach some sessions themselves or run a fully management-based model employing qualified teachers

What You Receive as a Monkey Music Franchisee

• ✓ An exclusive territory with a minimum catchment population to support a successful franchise
• ✓ Full rights to use the Monkey Music brand, curriculum and nearly 500 original songs
• ✓ Access to holiday workshops, nursery sessions, parties, events and merchandise revenue streams
• ✓ Intensive five-day business training academy covering marketing, operations, recruitment and finance
• ✓ Ongoing support from the Head Office Support Team (HOST), led by a dedicated franchise support manager
• ✓ Personalised dedicated webpage and local social media guidance
• ✓ Regular online training covering child psychology, GDPR, marketing and team management
• ✓ Your own licence, renewable every five years at no additional cost

Across four age groups Monkey Music delivers nearly 500 original songs, props, instruments and parent-bonding moments to 12,000 children every week

A Track Record of Award-Winning Success

Monkey Music was awarded BFA HSBC Franchisor of the Year 2022 (Bronze), reflecting its exceptional standards in franchisee support, operational excellence and network development. Founder Angie Coates is also a former BFA board member, bringing decades of industry influence and credibility to the network.

The Investment and Your Opportunity

The Monkey Music Franchise fee is £13,975 plus VAT. This covers your licence, exclusive territory, access to all curricula and trademarks, comprehensive business training and ongoing support. You will also need to factor in local working capital for the initial months before income builds, including venue hire and marketing activity.

Banks typically lend up to 70% of your capital requirements for a Monkey Music franchise, subject to a business plan and credit assessment. The franchise has strong relationships with lenders who understand the model.

Who Is the Ideal Monkey Music Franchisee?

You do not need a formal musical background to run a Monkey Music Franchise. Franchisees come from all walks of life, including corporate careers, teaching, nursing and retail. What matters is a passion for working with young families, strong communication skills and the determination to build a flourishing community business.

For further reading on the value of early music education, Nordoff Robbins Music Therapy, the charity supported by Monkey Music, publishes extensive research on music and child development.

How Monkey Music Started

Angie Coates trained as a classical oboist at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama and was head of music at a London prep school before her first child was born. When she went looking for an interactive class to attend with her baby daughter and could not find one, she built her own. The first sessions ran in a Dulwich church hall in 1993. Demand grew so quickly that by 1998 she was teaching close to 500 children a week and opened the model up to franchisees, becoming one of the UK's first female franchisors to join the British Franchise Association. The Monkey Music Franchise has been built on that same teacher-led curriculum ever since.

The Four-Stage Curriculum

Every Monkey Music class is built around an age-specific stage that maps to a child's developmental milestones. Each stage has its own songs, props and parent-and-child activities, so families progress through the brand for up to four years rather than dropping out after a single term. That long customer lifecycle is one of the model's quietly powerful commercial features.

A Week in a Monkey Music Territory

The operational rhythm of a Monkey Music Franchise is genuinely family-friendly. Classes run in term time, mostly mid-morning during the week with weekend sessions for working parents. A typical established franchisee delivers somewhere between 10 and 20 weekly classes across a handful of venues, often church halls, community centres and nurseries, with bookings managed online through the central system.

Outside class time, the work is split between marketing the next term's intake, planning props and curriculum themes, managing employed teachers if you have any, and running occasional nursery sessions, parties or holiday workshops. Most franchisees describe it as a school-hours business that fits around the school run, with quieter weeks during half-terms and longer breaks aligned to the academic calendar.

Revenue Streams Beyond the Weekly Class

The weekly class is the backbone, but the Monkey Music Franchise model is deliberately built so franchisees can layer in additional income on top of term-time bookings.

The UK Early Years Music Backdrop

Demand for structured early-years activities has held up well even through cost-of-living pressure, and parents continue to prioritise music, language and movement classes for the under-fives. Independent research summarised by Music Mark, the UK association for music education highlights gains in oracy, vocabulary, attention span and self-regulation in children who receive high-quality early-years music input. That evidence base helps a Monkey Music Franchise stand out from the more generic toddler-activity market when local nurseries and parents are choosing where to spend their term-time budget.

Who Tends to Thrive Running a Monkey Music Territory

Franchisees come into the network from corporate, teaching, performing and parenting backgrounds. The ones who do best tend to be confident with people, organised about marketing the next term ahead, and genuinely enjoy being around babies and small children every week. Local visibility matters more than musical training, so the franchisees who put the energy into building relationships with nurseries, antenatal groups and family-focused community pages usually grow fastest.

Interested in exploring more opportunities in this sector? Take a look at other children's franchise opportunities available on Franchise Hunt.