Licensing Regarding Streaming Your Sunday Services
I was recently asked by a friend how their local church can stream their services legally. This is something I am hearing a lot with the current situation.
Licensing is important when it comes to streaming Sunday services if you intend on streaming the worship and music portion of your service. This is because music included in the stream of such a worship service is often copyrighted material. As such, that music must be properly licensed when it is duplicated. A video stream of a music performance is considered a form of digital use/duplication.
Most churches assume that since they have a basic CCLI church license that they are covered for such activity, but that is likely not true. If you are using songs in your worship that aren't exclusively home-written or public domain, you will need to get permissions (licensing) from the copyright holders of those songs to include them in your Sunday streamed service.
Fortunately, there are some vendors who provide licensing packages for streaming of song content for churches and their services. Additionally, there are even some free options available. I deal with both "paid" and "free" solutions in this article.
Paid Licensing Solutions
The following are the "Paid For" licensing solutions that I am aware of. These are licensing solutions only (you must find a streaming provider to actually do the video streaming) -
- Worshipcast from CCS https://christiancopyrightsolutions.com/services/worshipcast/ -- this license package covers over 25 million songs that you can perform live in your church service and stream to your audience.
- CCLI Streaming license https://us.ccli.com/streaming-license-terms-of-agreement/ -- this license package covers over 300,000 songs (the vast majority of Christian worship publishing catalog). This license is an add-on agreement that you can purchase from CCLI and requires you first have the basic CCLI license, which most churches have.
- OneLicense Streaming option https://www.onelicense.net/how-it-works#podcast -- focused on music repertoire mostly for Catholic churches. This license is an add-on agreement that you purchase in addition to their basic church music license.
Important things you should know about these options:
- Live Performances only: Some churches use various musical accompaniment to augment their service music experience/sound, such as performance tracks/split trax, stems, multi-tracks or full purchased music. These are all pre-recorded productions whose rights are owned by the record labels that made them. They are not normally licensed for use in streaming services (such as the ones listed above) for your church. Your church would need explicit permission from the companies who made these recordings to use them in a situation which would be live streamed or broadcast in any way. Important exemption: because of the COVID19 outbreak, two vendors have worked with the record labels who own the master recordings and granted temporary licensing of their tracks under the coverage of the CCLI Streaming license (meaning you can use their tracks in your church service stream). If you have a CCLI streaming license and you purchase your tracks from any of the following: MultiTracks (see their announcement), Loop Community (their FAQ and their announcement on FB), and PraiseCharts (see their announcement) you can use those tracks during your streamed worship for the time being.
- Lyric Sync May Not Be Included: Any component of a song that is included in a video (called a sync) must be licensed. That means if you also included lyric projection in your video of your streamed service, that is a specific action requiring licensing. You should check with whichever licensing provider you select to be sure they include lyric sync with your use of their license or you should avoid including displayed lyrics in the video stream. Important exemption: I checked specifically with the folks at CCLI (chatted directly with their CEO Malcolm Hawker) and they confirmed that lyric sync for the use of your church service is already taken care of with their CCLI Streaming license.
- CVLI is not for streaming: CVLI (www.cvli.com) is a video licensing program brought to you by the same folks that run CCLI. Churches sometimes confuse this video licensing for a streaming licensing solution, but it is not. A CVLI license/membership is not a solution for streaming your service online or otherwise. CVLI is a specific license giving churches permissions to play video clips from a large collection of Hollywood movies and shows. People often use those clips as part of a youth group, Sunday morning sermon examples etc. Again, this has nothing to do with streaming the service. It is just the rights to use copyrighted materials (movies) by playing them in a church context.
Free Licensing Solutions
The following are the web stream solutions that include "free" licensing of music to anyone using their service. That means, these companies have already gone and secured the licensing from the copyright holders and record labels to allow music content to be distributed in videos hosted via their platforms. You don't do anything in that regard- these services take care of the licensing. In return, they make their money by displaying ads on the pages that contain your stream/video.
- YouTube Live Streaming (https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/2474026?hl=en-GB&ref_topic=9257984) -- You can live stream over YouTube without cost to you. However, like all such free services, they will monetize the content by displaying ads.
- Facebook Live (https://www.facebook.com/facebookmedia/solutions/facebook-live) - like YouTube, Facebook allows you to stream video on their platform. They monitor the content and try to match it for monetization and royalty distribution. Again this is all paid for with ads on your stream / on their site.
Final Caveats
This article is intended for research purposes of church leaders, musicians and those creating worship experiences for local churches. A couple of important follow up notes on this information:
- US Only info in this article: The info in this post is specific to the US and law and services found in the US.
- Not legal advice: I am not a representative of any of the companies mentioned here. I am just giving information that I think would be helpful for people asking questions about streaming their services. Also, I am not a legal representative or professional and this note is not legal advice. It is just research information for people and churches who are looking for info regarding services streaming.
I hope this is helpful to your churches and ministry leaders