New copyright licence to allow music in digital church services

Friday March 20th 2020

As an update to our earlier post offering guidance on sharing services on social media, CCLI (Christian Copyright Licensing International) has, in the last 24 hours, created a streaming licence.

Regardless of who your streaming partner is (eg Facebook, YouTube, etc), you still need a separate streaming licence when you use streaming services. 

Find out more about the CCLI streaming licence at this link: https://uk.ccli.com/streaming/ 

It’s so new, there is currently no button/link for this licence on the CCLI website so the above link must be used. Alternatively if you log in to your CCLI profile (which each church administrator will have set up) you will see that the new streaming licence is at the top of the list of available products.

If you want to have church musicians playing/performing songs that are under copyright control and you want to either:

  1. Have your musicians perform these songs as part of a live streaming church event
  2. Have your musicians record these songs as part of a pre–recorded church event that you later upload to a platform 

this licence covers you to:

  1. Stream directly from your own church website
  2.  Stream via a streaming partner (Facebook, YouTube, Vimeo, Zoom – that is the current list of streaming partners that CCLI is referring to.)
  3.  Include the lyrics of the songs in your live stream / recorded video (*this is not covered by the standard CCLI licencing products)

This licence does not cover you to play official released versions of songs (ie you are not covered to include a song from a Getty album into your live stream in the event you do not have any musicians available).

The cost of this streaming licence is £128 for 12 months, currently discounted to £115.

For more information please email uk@ccli.com or phone 01323 436100.

Back to latest news

Site Directory