As the 2025 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. 

ONE LICENSE 2025 Highlights:

With nearly 28,000 active licenses, the ONE LICENSE service covers the entirety of North America, Australia, New Zealand, the UK, Ireland, and continental Europe, as well as the rest of the English-speaking, Spanish-speaking, and French-speaking church.

Most Popular Posts of 2025:

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. 

Welcome to our new series: Utilizing Public Domain for Your Ministry. Throughout this series, we will examine public domain melodies as entities all their own, separate from any texts they have been combined with over the years. We want to help musicians think creatively about how to pair old melodies with new (or new to your congregation) texts and to point out some musical considerations that you may want to focus on when choosing songs for your congregation. We hope this series will inspire your ministry and invigorate your worship experience!

Have you ever found yourself confused by copyright terminology? Does thinking about the difference between a copyright holder and a publisher or wondering what it means if a title is copyrighted by one person but administered by a publishing house keep you up at night? If you’ve considered these or other copyright-related questions, simply take a look at this helpful list of copyright terminology, curated by the ONE LICENSE team! 

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

Claims, strikes, disputes—oh my! With many organizations using services like YouTube to share worship online, many License Holders are running into things like claims, strikes, and disputes. 

So what do these notices mean, how do you avoid them, and what should you do if you receive one?

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.

ONE LICENSE 101 was designed with newer users in mind. Filled with supportive and solutions-oriented content, this webinar provides helpful information for all of your team members and will keep you up to date on the latest information from ONE LICENSE.

Whether you are searching the database to report copyright usage, to confirm copyright permission, or to download a music image or text file, ONE LICENSE has a number of helpful search features to assist you. With over 275,000 titles in our catalog, it is important that you find what you are looking for, and fast! Here are some helpful points to get you started with searching best practices.

The ONE LICENSE team is excited to announce our upcoming series: Utilizing Public Domain for Your Ministry. Throughout this series, we will examine public domain melodies as entities all their own, separate from any texts they have been combined with over the years. We want to help musicians think creatively about how to pair old melodies with new (or new to your congregation) texts and to point out some musical considerations that you may want to focus on when choosing songs for your congregation. We hope this series will inspire your ministry and invigorate your worship experience!

There are a number of reasons why you might want to add additional users to your ONE LICENSE account profile. For example, you might want to add someone to assist with the creation of worship aids or inserting music images in a video, or someone to assist with regular copyright usage reporting. Perhaps you have multiple music ministers who are each responsible for music choices at different liturgies. Or perhaps your bookkeeper or someone else at your organization would like to receive an additional copy of the invoice when it is emailed to the account owner / primary user. 

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Featured image copyright: Photo by Akil  Mazumder: https://www.pexels.com/photo/photo-of-white-and-brown-fireworks-973590/