If your church wants to use songs for non-exempt church performances (not covered by the U.S. Copyright Law religious service exemption), such as concerts, special events, youth events, dance or aerobics classes, seminars and playing music before or after religious services, you can obtain discounted licenses from the performance rights organizations (PROs) directly from ASCAP, BMI and SESAC. If you are a Willow Creek Association member, you receive a deep discount for these licenses and do not have to report activities. For more information, call WCA at 847-765-0100 or visit their website at www.willowcreek.com. These licenses do not include internet public performance activities, and ASCAP, BMI and SESAC have separate special new media or internet licenses for internet performances, which are now available with CCA’s one-stop WorshipCast License.

ASCAP, BMI and SESAC license public performance rights for songs or musical compositions. The PROs are not authorized to license the performance of sound recordings, which is a separate copyright from the song.

Unlike most countries, the United States has three different performance rights organizations (PROs) that are authorized by songwriters and publishers to handle the public performance rights of their songs. Most countries have just one. The three organizations represent nearly 16 million copyrighted musical works and 600,000 songwriters and music publishers. A songwriter can affiliate with only one of the PROs to manage their songs public performance rights, such as concerts, TV, radio, and new media and internet uses. In order to make sure you are legally authorized to perform music in the song repertoires of all three PROs, you must have licenses from all three. For this reason, CCA has negotiated agreements with all three PROs for the special church song internet performance license, WorshipCast License, to greatly simplify the process and offer churches a one-stop license for internet song performance activity.