We at Christan Copyright Solutions regularly hear about the confusion and frustration that many worship leaders feel in trying decipher what rights are granted by the various blanket copyright licenses. It is certainly a confusion landscape, and we have created a short guide on the blanket licenses to explain what they cover and just as importantly what they don't.
Download "Church Copyright Blanket Licenses: What's Covered and What's Not" and feel free to duplicate it and share with friends and colleagues. If you still have questions, feel free to post them to the comments section on this blog and we will be happy to provide answers.
My church does a week long Vacation Bible School (VBS). This upcoming year, we’d like to do our own music by our praise band. Our theme is going to be basically “Guitar Hero” meets missions, so we’d like to do “Christianized” lyrics to popular music.
Every year we like to give out a CD of the music that’s presented to the kids that are attending. Usually, that’s not a problem because we get the duplication license from the company we normally buy our VBS stuff from. However, with this scenario, we’re not sure if we can legally do this.
No money changes hands anywhere. The praise band doesn’t get paid, we’d do the recording and duplication at the church, the kids don’t pay for anything during the VBS and the CD’s would be handed out for free. We normally run around 150 kids or so for the week so I can’t imagine there would be more than 200 copies required.
So, can we even do the music during the VBS week and can we make the CD’s? We’d be glad to get whatever license that’s necessary, your prices seem very reasonable.
Thanks.
Thanks for the question. You actually raise a few issues here.
First is the matter of your performance of the songs during the camp. If you are going to be performing copyrighted songs in a non-exempt setting (outside a religious service), you will need to have the performance rights cleared. You can get blanket coverage of over 16 million songs with our PERFORMmusic license (http://www.copyrightsolver.com/PerformMusicLicense.aspx).
The second issue is