As the calendar year comes to a close, the ONE LICENSE team would like to thank all of our License Holders for a wonderful year of ministry! We are grateful for you and your ministries, and wish you all the best in the year to come. 

Most Popular Posts of 2024:

The following articles were the most viewed by our License Holders this year. Check out the links below and reach out to our team (info@onelicense.net) with any questions or concerns. 

There are lots of reasons why organizations fall behind on their copyright usage reporting: 

  • Change in the music director or administrative assistant roles (which is often accompanied by a delay in hiring replacements)
  • Unclear expectations in the organization of who is responsible for a given task
  • A staff member becoming ill
  • Staff vacations, leaves of absence, or celebrating a well-deserved retirement

As church musicians and people of faith, the ONE LICENSE team understands how difficult navigating copyright law can be. Whether you have been responsible for reporting your organization’s copyright usage for years, or you are just getting started with reporting, we hope that this article will help you understand the whys, whats, and hows of reporting your music usage. 

Reasons why you would manually submit a title:

  • You have done your due diligence to search for a title from a Member Publisher by title, composer, first line, and the other browse-by options, but the title cannot be found. Find tips and tricks for searching our database here. 
  • You have a Podcast / Streaming License, which allows you to stream preludes, postludes, communion meditations, and other instrumental pieces and choral anthems that the congregation does not participate in. Understandably, the Member Publisher may not have prioritized the uploading of these titles, so a manual submission allows the Member Publisher to approve their accuracy and have them appear on your usage report for this specific license type.
  • You heard a song on a CD or at a service/concert/live event and the physical piece of music has not been engraved by the publisher yet, but you want to type the lyrics to use with your congregation. This also applies to new hymn collections and worship resources that are newly published in print, but digital editions are not available yet.

We typically hold our annual “New User Webinar” during the first quarter of the year – but this year, thanks to feedback from License Holders like you, our team was inspired to create several new webinar opportunities designed to assist License Holders at all comfort levels. ONE LICENSE 101 was designed with newer users in mind.

This year our team was inspired to create several new webinar opportunities designed to assist License Holders at all comfort levels. This ONE LICENSE 301 webinar was designed with our advanced users in mind. We recommend viewing the ONE LICENSE 101 – LIVE! and ONE LICENSE 201 – LIVE! recordings before the 301 recording.

A Podcast / Streaming License with ONE LICENSE revolutionizes the way you connect with your congregation and the world. These two license options not only allow you to record your services containing music for the duration of the license, but also to live-stream to members of your congregation who may be viewing from home, traveling, serving in active duty, or homebound.

There is a lot to think about when it comes to copyright, so perhaps you breathe a sigh of relief when discovering worship music that is in the public domain. However, being certain that a song or other work is truly in the public domain can sometimes prove challenging.

ONE LICENSE offers three license terms to meet the needs of churches and other organizations who want to use copyrighted music in their worship services: Single-Use, Event, or Annual. Here we will highlight how a Single-Use or Event License can help enhance your ministry. You can obtain licensing permissions for congregational reprints and podcast / streaming no matter which term of license you choose.

Each year as we near the season of Advent, the ONE LICENSE team receives multiple questions about the easiest way to report popular liturgical settings. Whether your worshipping community uses Mass or other Liturgical Settings regularly, or only a few times a year, this article seeks to provide you with some tips and tricks to quickly and effectively report the individual titles of covered settings.

ONE LICENSE 2024 Highlights:

With over 254,000 titles and 28,000+ active licenses, ONE LICENSE serves the entirety of North America, Australia, New Zealand, the UK, Ireland, and continental Europe, as well as the rest of the English-speaking and Spanish-speaking church.

Featured image copyright: Photo by Designecologist: https://www.pexels.com/photo/photo-of-fireworks-display-2526105/