Now there's any easy and affordable solution for churches which reproduce songs... or would like to.
It's called the Church Copyright Licence. It can loose your music department from the rigid demands of the copyright law and leave you free to legally copy over 150,000 songs and hymns. Here are just some of the ways the Church Copyright Licence allows you to copy songs:
Project songs from your overhead or slide projector.
Creating slides and overhead transparencies for projections is a practice used by many churches. They find projecting the songs by slide or overhead projector is useful for worship services, youth meetings, adult classes or prayer group where hymnals or other song resources are not available. Overheads are also helpful when introducing new songs and with the Church Copyright Licence your song selections are almost limitless.
Copy songs in bulletins that you hand out before worship service.
Many churches find it helpful to print the songs that will be sung during the worship service in the weekly bulletin. It makes it very easy for members to participate in the song service and gives the music minister a lot of flexibility. With the Church Copyright Licence you can legally copy any of over 150,000 covered songs. Almost every song sung in churches today.
Copy music on to songsheet handouts.
Copying songs from a variety of sources to create your own church songbooks.
This is proving to be a wonderful option to many churches. It allows them to select their favourite songs from a host of hymnals and songbooks and compile their own congregational songbook. It's an ideal and cost-effective way to utilise traditional and contemporary songs in your worship services.
Maintain a database of songs on your computer.
Even copying songs onto your computer requires legal permission. But for churches that regularly print songs in bulletins or on songsheet handouts a computer file of songs is a logical step. In fact some churches with very modern capabilities actually project songs from their computers. Whatever the case, the Church Copyright Licence is a perfect companion for a computer songbase.
IMPORTANT: This Licence does not convey the right to photocopy octavos, cantatas, musicals, orchestrations, vocal scores, handbell music, or other instrumental arrangements.
