Worship & Church Publishing

Where Music Lives in the Church

• How does worship music publishing work?

• Worship music, a genre of music inside the Christian music industry, involves the typical publishing process with a few additions. One major element is the ability for churches to obtain licenses to legally perform/play/display thousands of songs through an organization called CCLI.

• What is CCLI?

• CCLI stands for Christian Copyright Licensing International. In the same way that businesses obtain licenses to play any songs within a PRO’s catalog, churches will obtain licenses from CCLI to reproduce, perform, record, and stream 600,000+ Christian songs for an annual fee based on church size. This allows churches to obtain the rights to use worship songs and their lyrics without having to reach out to hundreds and hundreds of individual copyright owners. 

• How do worship writers get paid?

• As songs are played, performed, displayed, etc., at churches across the globe, these churches are tasked with submitting reports of songs they have used to CCLI within their repertoire. CCLI then distributes royalties to the registered song owners.

• Who owns songs written at church?

• It belongs to the writers of the song!

• Can churches claim ownership of worship songs?

Churches can often have their own publishing or record companies, but unless this is the case, the ownership belongs to the individual(s) who wrote the song.