Video Projects with Music Background

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Permalink Reply by Charles Wolff on February 15, 2010 at 3:23pm

I'm pretty sure this is one of the things that CCLI makes a point of saying they DON'T cover - but they don't seem to provide much information about how to go about it. Probably "contact the original publisher," and they DO have a lot of that contact information somewhere.

My understanding of this whole issue is that there are two separate copyright hurdles you may have to overcome here - the publisher of the SONG and the publisher of the RECORDING, which may be two entirely separate companies. Doing your own RECORDING of the song avoids the second, but even then, I think you need some sort of permission from the publisher of the SONG even if you're doing your own recording.

Then again, I'm always amazed at how many "worship videos" there are on YouTube where somebody has taken a commercial recording, laid in their own images (sometimes just a karaoke-like display of the words), and posted it... I don't think this is "legal," although the worship music publishers may be choosing to ignore it for now. And a lot of the songs that the worship planning sites don't seem to be able to get permission to use do show up on YouTube, and that was how we in the band learned the songs...

So, umm, suggestion: pick two or three favorite worship leaders who write and record their own material, start sending off letters asking for permission to use the materials, and hope that at least one of the companies gets back to you in time :-)

Other suggestion: since you're sending this to other churches, you may feel like you need to have recognized worship "hits" as your background music, but if not, zip on over to the songwriters' corner here on WtR, find a few songs that are sufficient for your purposes, and I'd imagine most of the writers here would be thrilled to have their music used for something like this.

Charles