New Thought Music License for you and Your Church!

Unarguably the most heated and discussed topic in our churches and the topic we get the most calls on from week to week is that of copyright compliance in our churches. A license is needed if you project or print lyrics for congregational singing, if you record music on your service recordings which are sold to the congregation, or if you live stream or post your services on the internet. This requires you to contact each copyright owner of each song each week to get permission to use the music, a task few churches can tackle or afford.

Enter the blanket license – a set fee that your church pays each year that allows you to use all of the songs in the administrator’s catalog. Now all a church has to do is report their use of music from month to month and you are in compliance with Federal copyright laws AND the creators of the music get their royalties from the administering organization.

Christian Copyright Licensing Inc (CCLI) offers such a license and has thousands of songs in their catalog that a church can use if you are paying their yearly license fee. Unfortunately for New Thought churches, the huge catalog of songs they represent are 95% unsuitable for our unique theology and do not represent the artists and songs that we love and use most in our churches.

Enter emPower Music Rights! A licensing service created by emPower Music & Arts, tailored to the needs and the music that is used in most Unity and New Thought churches. emPower Music Rights has hundreds of songs presently in their catalog and are adding more and more each day. Currently an emPower Music Rights license would allow you to use any music by Karen Drucker, David Roth, Faith Rivera, Karen Taylor Good, Richard Mekdeci, Sue Riley, Chris Foster, and many more.

License fees begin as little as $100 per year and are set according to the size of your congregation. If you are a music director we urge you to adopt this license for your church to be in integrity with copyright laws and in compensating the writers for the music you use. It requires you to report what music you use to emPower Music Rights in a simple online form that would take about 10 minutes per month.

You can browse the list of songs currently available online (more artists are adding their catalogs each day) and purchase a license HERE. If you are a songwriter and your music is in any of the Association songbooks or you have music that is played in churches, please go HERE and place your song in the catalog. It is a fast and simple process that costs you nothing and may result in payment to you when your songs are used.

This is a huge step for our churches to finally be in integrity with the music they use and for the songwriters who have given us so much great music through the years.