Media Outreach

As a follow up on last week’s post about image copyrights, today’s discussion will focus on music copyrights and their impact on the church world. In recent years, the Christian music scene has exploded into mainstream society. Gone are the days where Christian music consisted solely of hymnals and “Michael, Row Your Boat Ashore.” With the advent of online music services such as iTunes and websites such as YouTube, Christian artists now enjoy more avenues than ever before to spread their music.  However, although music is more easily distributed in today’s society, it does not diminish the ownership rights enjoyed by the parent companies and artists themselves that have existed for decades.

• Owning a CD does not equal owning intellectual property rights – It seems like music programs such as iTunes and Windows Media Player become more and more intuitive as each day passes. Simply inserting a CD into your computer while iTunes is running these days will prompt the program to rip music from your CD onto your computer. As is such, it is remarkably easy to turn your CD’s into mp3 files. There is absolutely nothing wrong with doing this… owning the CD gives you the right to do whatever you like with it for your own personal use. However, that use does not extend to distributing your CD collection across the internet. If you’re going to rip your CD’s… keep the music for yourself. Don’t upload Chris Tomlin’s Greatest Hits to your Sermon Connect account. To do so would be simply… indescribable (see what I did there)?
• Sheet music is music too – I know that this blog is supposed to deal with the technological side of life, but I would be remiss if I left sheet music out of our discussion. As a self-confessed band nerd, sheet music has been a part of my life for close to 20 years now. I, for one, think that praise and worship bands are awesome, and I’m ecstatic that they’ve become such an integral part in today’s church. However, it’s important to remember that an artist’s sheet music enjoys similar copyright protection as the music itself. Therefore, photocopying/distributing sheet music is no different than distributing CD’s & mp3’s of the same music.

How then, you might ask, does one acquire intellectual property rights, so that music can be a part of your website? In this case, while the internet has made it easy to illegally distribute music, it has also made it easy to acquire the rights. Specifically, services like CCLI enable a church to acquire the rights to thousands and thousands of different worship songs. In addition, services such as Musicnotes.com enable a user to legally acquire the sheet music to thousands of different songs as well.

Just as my last post, the purpose of this discussion is not to lecture or accuse, but to inform. In many cases, people who violate music copyrights do so not because they have malicious intent, but simply because they do not know that they’re doing something wrong. Today’s technology has made it very easy to do things the wrong way when it comes to music. Fortunately for us, the aforementioned services that are available have made it easy to do things the right way as well. Music can, and should, be a part of your website. Make sure that when you incorporate music into your website, you’re doing so in a way that is aesthetically pleasing and morally just.

Photo by MikeBlogs