What Is CCLI?

What Is CCLI?

Christian Copyright Licensing Inc. is an organization that was formed to help churches easily pay the many royalties due from the re-use of copyrighted materials.

It’s easy!

Put simply, each time a church uses a song in a public worship service, (adult, youth, children’s or bible study) and a copyrighted song is sung, made into an overhead, printed for bulletin or recorded to a tape or other media, the church is legally responsible to pay the copyright holder (publisher or composer) a small re-use fee.

Because the typical church uses many songs from literally hundreds of publishers, contacting and receiving permission to use, or making rightful payment would be an administrative nightmare. CCLI was formed to simplify things.

What You Do:

When a church joins CCLI (by signing up and paying a yearly fee, based on church size), they simply record each copy, of any type they make of all legally obtained copyrighted works (you still must purchase a legal copy of a copyrighted song) and send this list to CCLI during their churches reporting period.

What They Do:

CCLI take the money they received from over 78,000 member churches, and based on the recorded use reports, splits up the fees according to estimated use nationally. Nearly all publishers have signed on with CCLI and so nearly anything in your library of music is covered.
Warning! Non CCLI member churches, are responsible to pay royalties to copyright holders, according to international copyright law, for any and all re-use of copyrighted materials. Fines of up to $25,000 per violation can be imposed! Of course, Aardvark Hill does not run around looking for copyright violation. In fact, we would cheerfully give you our songs if you can’t afford to buy them, rather than have you go with out or have illegal copies! But not all publishers are as trusting or forgiving of error and/or ignorance of copyright laws. Some do look.

It’s The Right Thing To Do

We do believe that Churches should take extra care to obey the laws of this and other nations. Bby doing so, they set an example to others, and live rightly before God and man. And hey, it’s only right to give honor (or pennies!) to those who bless you with songs that often have strong impact countless lives.

Feed An Aardvark!

It doesn’t seem like much, but each time you report one of our songs to CCLI we receive a few cents out of the large royalty pie. If enough churches use our song, it can really add up and we and each of our composers are very thankful to you and CCLI.

Get Started:

CCLI takes the worry and hassle out of keeping your churches worship services legal! To find out more about CCLI, or become a member church, please visit the CCLI web site.