COVID-19 Live Stream Permissions Update

We’re nearly a year into a world of COVID and live streaming and we’ve seen churches around the world creatively and effectively serve their churches in singing psalms and hymns and spiritual songs, with thankfulness in your hearts to God regardless of circumstance! As you continue to do so, we’ve learned a few things that we hope will help you.

If you use a copyrighted recording of a song during your live stream, it’s still possible the streaming platform you use will claim your video for monetization. That just means they’re collecting royalties for the songwriters. We ask that you please not dispute these claims. To do so may result in their disabling your video. This is especially true for YouTube and Facebook. If this happens, please let us know and send us the URL to your video so we can investigate.

We also recently learned that CCLI is very close to launching their master use streaming license, and once that’s launched, churches will need to secure that in order to use songs in online streams. That would apply to any original recordings from Sovereign Grace Music.

If you have further questions, visit our permissions page to see if your question has been answered there. If not, feel free to contact us.