James the Worship Composer - Christians Who Sell Jesus

Selling Jesus

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00:00

James is a worship leader. When he was single, he wrote some of his best worship songs in the evenings while working at a bookstore to make ends meet.

00:09

His heart's passion is to serve the church with Bible -saturated, God -centered, beautiful music that will point people to Christ.

00:18

And in the days of MySpace, he was happy to post his songs for free for people to stream, and some of them started going viral.

00:25

Eventually, a Christian record label approached him and laid out a plan to turn his passion into a quote -unquote career.

00:33

James trusted them because they seemed like sincere believers and were obviously quote -unquote professionals who had been in the worship business for decades.

00:43

They convinced him that the best way to bless the most Christians with his music would be to join them and use his gifts to generate a full -time income.

00:52

Now, James leads worship events for large conferences and usually charges an upfront fee of tens of thousands of dollars for each event.

01:00

His songs are now sung in churches around the world and bring in a steady stream of income through royalties and CCLI.

01:08

He's happy that more people than he ever imagined are being touched by his music and encounter the presence of God.

01:15

His recordings are no longer free to listen to, but every now and then, he'll release one at no cost to download, which makes him feel good that he has done his part to be generous.

01:26

James has been deceived by the quote -unquote professionals into believing that the worship of God can be sold as a commodity.

01:35

He also has bought into the lie that reaching large numbers of people means that God must automatically approve of the way one is doing ministry.

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God must be happy and honored with the means if the outcome is large. Unfortunately, he has failed to take seriously the account of Jesus cleansing the temple because the place of worship and prayer had been turned into a marketplace.

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If James is honest with himself, he remembers being happier before he turned his passion into a full -time career that denies people access to his music unless they pay.

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Although his former way of life proved that he could write amazing songs for the church without treating it as a full -time business, he now tries to convince himself that it's the only way for him to make it quote -unquote sustainable.

02:24

He has already signed contracts and feels trapped in a corporate landscape that feels nothing like a real ministry, but everyone he respects is doing the same thing.

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And older, wiser Christians assure him that he's doing what's sensible and that God is using him powerfully.

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And so, in his heart, the lie that the Jesus trade is respectable and inevitable has prevailed.

03:31

writing theological songs. And it used to be the case that the people who were writing songs were actually ministers, right?

03:38

And they were thinking deep thoughts, like this was their job to think deep thoughts about the Bible and then to express those in song if they had the skill and ability to do so.

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And now it's shifted to those who have the skill and ability to do so do this, and maybe they're thinking deep thoughts.

03:57

So what happened in that old model, bringing this back to money and ministry, there's obviously more problems than just money and ministry.

04:03

But bringing this back to money and ministry, what you have is, well, you used to have people who are already funded by different means doing this.

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And now you have people who are not funded by different means doing this, and they have to figure out how to be funded.

04:17

Our solution to a lot of these issues are that if it's part of ministry and a church is the primary headquarters of supporting ministry and funding ministry, then it's very reasonable for a church to just understand that this is part of what one of our ministers is doing, and this is part of what we are funding him to do.

04:38

And the issue really resolves itself. It's when this is being done as a parachurch ministry, from my perspective, it's when this is being done as a parachurch ministry that you run into a lot of these issues of, okay, well, how do we fund this?

04:50

Well, it seems easiest to fund it through sales and through very traditional publishing deals of exclusive licenses, etc.

04:57

Yeah. And I think it's a real problem with the publishers because the ordinary

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Christian usually doesn't know how all this stuff works when they first start out and they just look to see what other people are doing.

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And it seems like everyone's going with a publisher and commercializing their music. And so same with books, like a lot of first -time authors, they don't know what to do and they just follow what everyone else does.

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And they publish their book, they lose the rights to it, and they can't even share it with their friend anymore. They have to buy a copy for them.

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The same happens with music. People end up commercializing it because that's what everyone else is doing. And they haven't gotten any good advice to do anything differently.

05:34

But how many artists would actually get as big as James anyway?

05:40

From what I understand, it's one of those industries where you end up with a handful of artists getting super popular, and then there's just hundreds and hundreds of more who never get heard of.

05:53

And so the idea that going with a publisher, yeah, maybe you will end up being that one person, that one celebrity, who ends up blessing lots of people with their music.

06:04

But for the vast majority, they're never going to go very far anyway. Would you say that's true of Christian music?

06:10

I mean, that's certainly the case with secular music. Yeah, I think that's absolutely spot on. I know a guy who is a brother of a friend of mine from college who was one of the most talented individuals

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I have ever seen musically. I mean, off the charts guitar skills and singing skills, songwriting skills as well.

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And I would say, you know, at least an order of magnitude more talented than somebody like Chris Tomlin.

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But Chris Tomlin is always going to dominate, no matter what. You know, this guy has been struggling for the last 10 years to really make a dent in the kind of following that somebody like Chris Tomlin has.

06:49

So yeah, absolutely. It really comes down to a lot of things that are so outside of your control or your talent level.

06:57

Yeah, and so the argument that artists need to sell their music, otherwise how are they going to make a living?

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Well, most artists don't make a living anyway, because their songs don't go very far.

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And I did sit down with a reasonably popular musician where I am, and you know, his music still can't pay him a full -time wage, so a livable full -time wage.

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And so even though he's quite popular, he's not Chris Tomlin, but he's fairly popular. And so that if he can't even, you know, earn enough money to go full -time, how on earth is anyone else going to be able to?

07:33

So the argument that you need to sell music so that artists can support themselves, well, most artists can't support themselves right now anyway.

07:41

The thing I'd like to transition to is what would we counsel James to do? Let's say he sits down and he says, okay,

07:47

I want to make a change. Let's just walk through how does he do that? What does he need to do?

07:53

Or even somebody who's starting from the beginning, what are practical ways that they can work through this?

08:00

Just like we talked about with the author. I would say the first one is simply if success is not, you know, how many listens you get or something like that, but it's faithfulness to God, then that really changes the parameters for how to pursue it.

08:14

But then, yeah, practically how if you want funding for this, and you're not going to just self -fund it, right?

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Because those are the two options that you have. You either fund it yourself or you have other people help you fund it.

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You find partners. And then who do you find partners from? Is it people in your church? Is it through your church or is it through outside of your church, right?

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And then within your church, you know the channels available to you there. You talk to your pastors or maybe you are one of the pastors and you talk to your congregation about funding this.

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Or if it's outside the church, well, then you use the channels you have available there, which are whatever kind of crowdfunding utility you might want or just asking for help directly and letting them know that they will be partnering in this work with you.

09:00

Yeah, so I would probably suggest just from my own experience, you know, some of the basic things are really obvious.

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Giving people free downloads of your music is a great place to start for everything. Probably should go without saying, but same with Joe the author, you know, we had this long conversation about Joe with the whole issue of how should he license his book or his books.

09:24

And so we would advise the same thing, right? Make it clear that you're releasing your music as public domain and that's it.

09:31

Right, and we had mentioned several other things about formatting there. And of course, these aren't, you know, central to this project of freely giving, but it's something that really shows a heart that wants to serve is to offer things and formats that people are able to reuse how they would like.

09:49

So, you know, if you're an author and you release things as an ebook, that's pretty easy to put into other formats, that's great.

09:57

With music, you know, there's individual tracks that you could put out so that you could have just an instrumental version of this, et cetera, right?

10:04

You know, if you're an artist, you know how people want to use these things. So be thinking about that as opposed to just offering it the way that it's usually offered, which is, you know, just one final published thing.

10:15

And then you have to go hunt and get special deals to get all the things you actually want access to. Yeah. And to be honest, it is quite hard to publish things freely at the moment because there isn't a lot of people doing that.

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There isn't a good platform for publishing it on. However, guaranteed in the next few years, there will be.

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And so as Conley said, another format you should think about if you are using a music program to write your song and put the notes in there, then publish the music

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XML file that you can export from that. And that will be really useful for putting it into apps and tools in the future so that they can easily produce sheet music from that.

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You can customize and easily transpose notes and things like that. So yeah, produce a variety of formats, make it really easy for people to use.

11:04

And in the future, there's definitely going to be a platform to make this much easier. Yeah. And just, I always want to bring it back to, you know, how are you doing this to serve people?

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Are you doing it to entertain people? Are you doing it to serve people? And, you know, it's that service mentality that will push you the extra mile to do these kinds of things that John is mentioning because those things take time and a lot of people don't want to deal with the headache of figuring out something new.

11:34

Okay, so how do I get the musical notation exported in a format that's useful to other people, etc.?

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But, you know, if we come at it like, how are we truly trying to be servants to our brothers and sisters in Christ, then that makes a big difference in the way we approach it.

11:53

As far as other practical concerns, Spotify. Spotify is dominating right now.

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I don't think most people would even download your mp3 or whatever if you posted it on your website because so many people have iPhones and you can't even download a file onto an iPhone.

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So most people would just default to Spotify if they want to play anything.

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And so I have my music on Spotify. The problem is that Spotify automatically pays you for your streams and there's no way to opt out of it.

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So what do you guys think of that? How do you navigate that issue? You're still, you're gonna get some ill -gotten gain by default from Spotify, whether you want to or not.

12:42

Are people restricted from listening to it on Spotify? Obviously they probably have to listen to ads, but are they able to listen to it without having...

12:51

There's no paywall, no. Yeah, they'll hear ads once in a while. Yeah, I'm all for putting things where people find them accessible, and if they want to go there, it's not you that's foisting the ads upon them.

13:05

And of course, only to the non -premium subscribers. Yeah, and you can just make clear that all the money you're donating to ministry or somewhere, you're not keeping it for yourself.

13:15

Just make that clear. I guess it's one of those gray areas that you might want to pray about. Yeah, I'm not super satisfied with the idea that donating it makes it, sanctifies it, right?

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Because it is... No, it's more of a best out of a bad situation kind of thing.

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You know, my position at this point is, going back to the service issue, you know, I'm trying to serve people where they're at, and I don't think it's ideal, but I don't think

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God is sitting there waiting to be super legalistic about it and slap everybody's wrist like, oh, well, you're a bad

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Christian now because of that. So I just want to be open.

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Maybe we could speak to this on this podcast that we don't want people to spiral down into this sort of ultra -legalistic fear of, oh, am

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I going to do the wrong thing, the unideal thing, so I get paralyzed by all the difficult systems in place that make it so complicated for me to give freely.

14:19

Yeah, ideally, this should give people freedom, right? The freedom to say this is right and this is wrong and to move forward.

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But yeah, where it becomes difficult, we're not trying to, like you said, paralyze anyone.

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And to be crystal clear here, what we're discussing is after you have already given your song completely for free, public domain on your own website or another avenue.

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So we're not talking about the many ministries that do try to profit from ads and things like that.

14:49

This is unavoidable profiting we're discussing. Yeah, so I guess the takeaway here is if you've done your due diligence, which a lot of people don't, admittedly, right?

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That's what we're trying to encourage. Do your due diligence on making it freely available, making it clear that it's free and public domain.

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And then after that, the cards may fall in an unideal place if you're trying to serve people, but don't stress out or freak out about that.

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Yeah, and you can also do what we do on our YouTube channel, which is post a link to a place you can watch it without ads.

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And so kind of using those ad services to redirect to a free service if people want that.

15:33

So I imagine we want to talk about a little bit about how someone might raise money.

15:38

But before we do that, I just want to ask the question, do you guys think musicians actually need support?

15:45

That's a good question. I was kind of wondering that given some of the things you all were saying earlier. I do think that it should not be just unthinkable or entirely unreasonable to consider the possibility of someone being a full -time artist.

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I don't think we should be sitting here saying that, that, you know, oh, this isn't worth a full -time pursuit or whatever.

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And if you are doing it full -time, well, then you would need support. Now, how many people should be doing it full -time for full -time support is another question.

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But I do think it's something that may be for some people. And I would say if God opens the doors for that, that's great.

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That's probably a sign that God wants you to be one of those few people who are doing it full -time.

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But don't go into it, you know, you're a 21 -year -old and you're like, this is what

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I want to do full -time and everyone's got to support me now. You have to work into some of these things sometimes.

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And God will slowly, I think, reward faithfulness with more and more support if he wants you to go more and more full -time.

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And that's with a lot of things. So it's not like I either go full -time or I do nothing.

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And that's this false dichotomy a lot of people come at it with. And I don't think that's helpful at all.

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There's lots of spectrum there for people to work with and ways for God to provide and ways for you to be a tentmaker or have a bivocational ministry in that way.

17:17

So yeah, as a musician myself, I can say that I've never been a full -time musician, but sometimes not being full -time is a lot more joyful.

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And I'm actually very thankful that God has never put me in a position to be full -time or to do the typical touring kind of thing either.

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I think God rescued me from what I might have tended towards in my youth to do something like that.

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You know, everybody, when they're a young musician, they want to be the next, I don't know, Shane and Shane or whatever.

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And God closed those doors. And I'm really thankful because at the end of the day, that's for a lot of people, that's really draining and takes a lot of the joy out of your art when you're having to repeat it over and over and you're on the road, or you're just always treating it like a business, or even if it wasn't a business, right?

18:10

Just as a daily work, you know, eight hours a day, that really, really can wear out your joy in it as an art form.

18:19

Yeah. And so to clarify, we absolutely affirm the right to be supported in ministry.

18:25

And so this is more of a wisdom question. And I think it is unwise to, especially being in the situation where you have created some popular songs, you got a

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Patreon, people are donating to you, but then you're not actually using that time that people are donating to, to actually produce anything else.

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And so, you know, and that's what happens in the music industry where you release some hits and you just keep collecting royalties, whether you're working or not.

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So, whereas I don't think that's the purpose of supporting Christian ministry. So if you're actually raising donations, you should be using that to help you to produce more content.

19:01

And if you're not producing anything anymore, then you should probably stop receiving those donations. I would think earlier,

19:07

John, you made a point where you said a lot of people feel like they need to sell in order to get paid and most don't even get paid.

19:15

So you don't actually need to sell anything. What about those who think, well, I need to sell in order to get heard because it's only by making this exclusive deal with this record label that my music is going to get out there.

19:27

And given all the variables we were talking about that really determined whether or not someone is successful, are we saying that people should just deny themselves those opportunities that seem to be the things that make songs get heard?

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Is it just the case that, well, you're probably not going to ever get heard on K -Love or whatever the

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Christian radio stations are these days because you're not going to sign one of those deals?

19:52

Yeah. I mean, I would say firstly, faithfulness is more important. So do not sell your worship music because it's simply wrong from a scriptural point of view.

20:01

But I would also say, I believe things are going to change. This movement is starting to pick up pace.

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I mean, it's been in scripture since the beginning, since scripture was written. And I believe people are, things are going to change.

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There are going to be free platforms for free content and people aren't going to think of them as the cheap knockoffs.

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They're going to think of them as the high quality stuff. It's just a matter of time. And so be one of the first to start changing things, to start producing, produce really high quality music and give it away for free and start setting an example for others.

20:36

There are, in a way, a lot of these platforms. And I guess the issue is if you are worried about marketing, right?

20:45

You're not a marketing guru. You don't know how to get your music out there, but this label has a whole machine behind it to do that.

20:52

And you're either banking on, you know, the Facebook group or Twitter, you know, friends that you share it to, sharing it appropriately or having a marketing machine behind it.

21:03

Boy, it does seem like that's a real temptation there to, you know, go ahead and sign that exclusive deal in order to get that marketing machine.

21:11

And to make it clear why I'm talking about exclusive deals, what that exclusive deal says is then while others can't use this freely as they might like to, we would control the rights to it as the record label.

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And that's the real danger there. Because at that point, even if you're not getting money in return, you are exchanging your work for an obligation to fulfill the license requirements.

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You can only listen to it if you follow these requirements from me. I think from a pragmatic standpoint, a lot of that argument is outdated because it used to be that the media machine was controlled by, tightly controlled by a few people up at the top, even in the

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Christian industry. But now YouTube has completely reversed that. You know, we just saw, who was that guy who went viral recently?

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North of Richmond, whatever that guy's name was. Exactly. He's a nobody, goes viral. And then it wasn't because he had a marketing machine or paid for ads or anything.

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It was because it resonated with people and it was high quality. And then he's having people offer him contracts because he's already famous.

22:18

And I think that's what a lot of people are dealing with now is that total reversal. Yeah. I don't think it's as applicable anymore for people to fear that obscurity just because they didn't get the marketing machine.

22:32

So it sounds like the answer is in the end. Yeah. Don't sign the exclusive deal, even if you think that's what you need.

22:38

Yeah. Find other avenues to advertise your material. And it's also what your goal is going into what

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Andrew was saying earlier about, you know, are you doing this just so that you can feel good about yourself so that you know that lots of people are listening to your music?

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Or are you actually doing it to serve God and serve his people and see what he does with it?

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And I think Matthew, one of our friends, Matthew Pretzel, he would say, you know, focus on serving your local congregation first, write music for your local congregation.

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And, you know, if other congregations find it helpful too, great, but you don't necessarily have to have your eyes set on it going across the whole world.

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You can just serve those in your near vicinity first. We live in an age,

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I just want to comment on this. We live in an age where music production has never been more affordable and accessible.

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And so we really shouldn't be talking about these lame excuses anymore that, oh, I can't afford to go into a professional studio and drop $40 ,000 to record an album.

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That's no longer an issue. There is no excuse anymore to say, oh,

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I need, you know, $5 ,000 per song that I record because that's the expenses behind it.

23:57

That's not true. If you want to make it that expensive, you can. You don't have to. It's just unbelievable the amount of stuff that you have that's beyond even the professional grade from 20 years ago that you have at your fingertips now.

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It's not hard. It just takes a little doing, you know, a little research and creativity and you can create stuff in your own bedroom that's better than or at least equal to what

24:24

Taylor Swift can create. So going back to this question of the marketing machine and the fear of obscurity, on the other end of this, as listeners to music or consumers of music or churches that are choosing which songs they're going to sing each

24:41

Sunday, do you think there's an obligation on us as the consumers to make it so that that power that the record labels hold is not so strong?

24:53

Do we have an obligation either to seek out more obscure works?

25:00

Do we have an obligation to boycott or not listen to the works that are offered non -freely?

25:07

What would you all say? I would seriously consider trying to, if you're a pastor of a church, trying to move your church to free music because it's just wrong.

25:17

It's an abuse of worship. It pollutes the worship of God by paying people money every time you sing a song.

25:24

And as someone who's been exploring these issues, I am a part -time pastor. I also attend a church where I submit to a pastor and I struggled for months trying to worship

25:37

God and trying to sing knowing that people were profiting of it. And the more people that become aware of that, the more people that will be distracted in their worship will feel wrong to worship

25:49

God. And so yeah, I would look into seeing if you can move, if your church is comfortable singing hymns, singing songs that are public domain, you should totally go that route right now.

26:03

There are modern songs that are free. It's just a matter of time to collect them and we'll be working on initiatives to do that.

26:11

So there will in the future be an easy way to find free modern and traditional hymns in one place.

26:18

So it will get easier, but start thinking and praying about it right now. Yeah, I don't know if I would go so far as to say we have an obligation to avoid those things, but I would say the more you study, the more you think and meditate on the truth of scripture regarding these things,

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I think the more unsettled you will become and the more you will be unable to turn a blind eye to how problematic it is in your own experience, in your own congregation.

26:50

And so that just may at the end of the day end up making you feel unsettled enough to do something about it.

26:57

So yeah, I don't know if I would move it into the realm of obligation, but I would say that we're certainly all obligated to think deeply about it and to act accordingly as God works in our conscience.

27:09

And I would say the same thing for people who are musicians listening to this. If you're a musician and you compose worship music like James, start being part of the change.

27:21

Start supplying the church, the body with stuff that's free and open that can put people in a better position to enjoy your music and worship the

27:32

Lord and not feel that kind of tension that we all feel now when we see

27:37

CCLI stuff appear on the screen and copyright notices that are longer sometimes than the actual song itself that appears on the screen after you sing it.

27:47

It's painful every time I see it when I go visit a church or whatever. And that brings us to CCLI.

27:53

Yeah, just before we do to throw my own answer in there, I think I agree with what you all are saying that there's an obligation that we have to think deeply about this and then each person might be called in a different way to address those concerns that scripture addresses.

28:10

But yeah, this principle that we're putting forward is primarily for the minister, right?

28:16

And then only secondarily for the one who is consuming ministry or is it in a different way, right? Because if they're holding hostage this ministry and you pay the ransom fee, yes, you might not want to perpetuate people holding things hostage and paying ransom fees.

28:34

But at the end of the day, it's your choice whether or not you decide to pay those kinds of ransom fees. That's the way

28:40

I think about this. Yeah, that's good. But yeah, CCLI, let's talk about it. One thing first up you should know about them is they're a for -profit company.

28:50

So they are not a charity. They are not even a non -profit. They're a for -profit. They're just a regular company.

28:57

And even more disturbingly, I recently found out that CCLI had been sold back in 2016 to SESAC.

29:08

So that's S -E -S -A -C, which is a for -profit secular performance rights organization.

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So they're another organization for collecting royalties, but they have no

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Christian identity. They're literally just a secular for -profit company.

29:29

And it goes even deeper. SESAC, shortly after they acquired

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CCLI. So the next year in 2017, they themselves were acquired by Blackstone, which is again a secular firm.

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And in this case, it's an investment firm. So they will own lots of other companies and properties to simply make money.

29:53

And they have been accused of some dodgy things, but I don't think we need to go there too much because the very fact that CCLI is owned by secular investors is itself a problem.

30:10

And so what this means is that every church that is signed up to CCLI, which is

30:16

I'm guessing a majority of evangelical churches in the West, will be paying them part of their royalties.

30:24

So part of their worship tax, if you will. And so the money isn't just going to Christian artists.

30:31

It's actually a portion of it is going to the secular investment firm. And I haven't found out exactly how much that portion is, but as an educated guess,

30:41

I know that similar organizations would take something like 10 % to 15 % of the cut.

30:47

And so let's say, for example, it's around 10 % of every time you pay

30:52

CCLI, around 10 % is going to these secular investors. Was it founded by a believer?

30:58

It was. Yeah, I believe. And probably started with good intentions as many of these things do.

31:05

But nevertheless, there's no financial accountability there. So just a step back here for anyone who might not be sure what it is we're talking about.

31:14

If you've never seen it, a lot of times you go to a church and on the projector, there's something at the bottom that says

31:19

CCLI number blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. The reason that that is there is because that church has registered with CCLI and gotten their permission to republish or redisplay,

31:33

I'm not sure what the right phrase would be here, but to use various songs that are covered under CCLI.

31:40

Now, a lot of times they'll put that there on every slide, even if the song is not covered by CCLI and it has nothing to do with CCLI, they'll just put that on every slide.

31:49

But that's the thing that we're talking about. And so what this costs church, I'll just read off the website. So if you want permission to sing these songs and to stream the songs, and then there's additional things they'll charge you for too, lyrics, et cetera.

32:03

But let's just pretend you want the rights to use a song in a typical worship service and stream it.

32:09

$74 for the base cost of just being able to use it in the worship service and an additional 77 to stream it.

32:14

And that's for a church with only 24 people in attendance, that's a yearly fee. And then if you're a much larger church, it'd be almost $1 ,000 base cost, or sorry, over 1 ,000, $1 ,101 base cost, and then $431 for streaming.

32:30

So that'd be for a large, you know, 5 ,000 person church. So yeah, if you didn't realize that the most churches are paying a worship tax in order to worship, that's precisely what's going on.

32:41

Yeah, it's just very common. Now, John will tell us what exactly it is that you're purchasing here.

32:49

Yeah, well, just a step before that, how it actually works is that your church will sign up for an annual license with this company,

32:57

CCLI, and then they also need to report every time they sing a song. So whatever they sing, they need to report that to CCLI so that they can work out how much, how to distribute the royalties.

33:10

So not only, it turns out, not only are they, you know, there's the commercial side of it, they're actually, there's a privacy issue in some ways that they know exactly what every church is singing all the time.

33:22

They have quite a bit of statistics on what churches are doing and how they're worshiping and how often and things like that.

33:28

So there's a burden on churches to report, especially for a small church where you've only got a handful of volunteers.

33:34

It is a pain to have someone have to go on the website. I mean, you know, it's reasonably quick,

33:41

I guess, but it's still just irritating to have to do that each week to say what we've sung.

33:47

And, you know, there's always the issue of forgetting to do it and then having to go through and work out what did we sing back then.

33:53

And you pay per year and you also pay even if you are singing public domain songs. So if you are singing hymns, say your church is really into hymns and you are just singing hymns like 90 % of the time, you will still pay the same fee, the same amount, even though all of those hymns are public domain and free to sing.

34:12

And so where does all that money go? I assume it all goes to CCLI. And so they are profiting off public domain old hymns that are out of copyright, that they do not own themselves.

34:24

And because there's no one to distribute the royalties to, I assume they just keep it for themselves. They're probably better described as like a third party that goes around collecting payment.

34:35

So they don't handle legal issues. So if you, yeah, if a publisher has an issue with you, how you've been using their songs, the publisher, and you haven't been, you know, paying using their third party service, which is

34:47

CCLI, they'll be like, well, you haven't paid us kind of thing. So that rather than offering legal protection, what they're doing is they're acting as a third party who goes around collecting money.

34:59

And then the publisher will be like, hey, did you collect money from this church? And they're like, no, they didn't pay us.

35:04

And so then the legal suit would be between the publisher and the church and CCLI would not be involved.

35:10

To put a bit of a disclaimer, we're going to discuss some of the legal aspects soon and none of us are lawyers, but I have looked through a lot of copyright laws.

35:19

So I do know mostly what I'm talking about. Yeah. And I have a lot of experience in this area too, working alongside of copyright lawyers and a big tech company.

35:29

And then in addition to that, we recently had a sit down with an international

35:35

IP lawyer to talk about some of these things. So this is something we have looked into. And so while we might not be, you know, experts or able to give legal advice, we have looked into this a bit.

35:46

So yeah, John, what exactly are you getting the rights to when you register with them? Interestingly, very interestingly, what we have discovered is that most churches and most people would assume that you are getting the right to sing the songs and also to copy the sheet music and things like that.

36:05

Now, copyright covers a lot of things. And one of the things that it covers is the performance of a work.

36:12

And so if you are going to sing a song, if you're going to perform it at church, that is covered by copyright, but it does get complex because there's different laws in different countries.

36:23

Now, this is the thing that we realized is that CCLI does not give you the right to perform, to sing a song.

36:30

So there's four main things that they get you to report and they give you the rights to.

36:36

One is to print sheet music. The other is the digital display of music and also record music and also whether you translate it.

36:45

And you have to look at what kind of plans you have to have and what you have to pay to do some of those things.

36:51

But the main thing we want to focus on is the performance of music because that is not actually granted in the license.

36:58

And the most likely reason for that is because CCLI started in the US and the

37:04

US has an exemption for churches, for religious organizations. And so you do not need permission to perform religious songs in a religious service.

37:16

Do you have the exact wording of that Conley? Okay. So I'm going to read what the exceptions are in US copyright law.

37:24

So, you know, copyright touches a lot of things. There's a lot of things that doesn't touch, you know, for example, recipes, copyright doesn't cover recipes.

37:31

So you could, if you found somebody else's, you know, your arch nemesis, pie baking neighbors, you know, secret pie recipe, you would be able to in the

37:41

US use that if you discovered their secret without copyright infringement. One of the things that is exempted under copyright law is performance of a non -dramatic literary or musical work or of a dramatic musical work of a religious nature or display of a work in the course of services at a place of worship or other religious assembly.

38:03

So this is specifically in the context of a worship service. So in the context of a worship service, you are free to perform worship music or any other kind of work that might have otherwise been covered by copyright.

38:15

Interestingly, it also talks about displaying. And John, you had just mentioned that probably they didn't cover performances because those are exempt in the

38:24

US, but it covers projecting and projecting is also exempted because that's just displaying a copyrighted work for the purpose of worship.

38:31

Now, maybe it's a little less clear because it might be talking about displaying something that you would venerate or something like that, right?

38:39

But that's not the way it's written. It's just written as displaying. So what is someone doing when they're projecting lyrics?

38:45

They are displaying them. Yeah. And so you're not giving individual audience members a copy of it. You're just displaying it for them to look at.

38:52

And then the service is done, it's gone. So that is displaying. So that's a real interesting thing here for a lot of people.

38:59

I guess this has become more complicated now that since COVID, pretty much all churches are streaming. But before that, before you had to worry about streaming and a lot of churches were projecting lyrics onto the wall, what were they paying

39:13

CCLI for? They weren't actually getting anything. They already had the right to perform. They already had the right to project.

39:19

Yeah. It's just the printing and rearranging and streaming that are more, I guess, legally ambiguous.

39:25

I don't even want to even say that it's necessarily the case that they need the rights to do those things either. Yeah. And so you could theoretically today just cancel your subscription with CCLI, display lyrics on a screen for people to sing, perform the song all for free.

39:42

And then the only thing you really need to worry about, if you're okay with that kind of setup, is how the musicians see the music.

39:51

And you could potentially bring along an iPad, bring up the chords on a website, and you're not making a copy in that case.

39:59

And you could perform the song that way for free and you wouldn't need CCLI. Right. And then you'd also have to worry about streaming, right?

40:06

If you are streaming, that's where it gets tricky. And you need an extra license for that. So you have to pay extra for streaming.

40:11

And that's why I'm very curious how much money CCLI made when everyone went to streaming during COVID.

40:18

So I imagine they sold a lot of streaming licenses that year. So where this gets more interesting is that, as I mentioned,

40:27

CCLI started in the U .S., they modeled their license on U .S. law, and they have expanded to many other countries, including

40:35

Australia, where I'm from. And the license, as far as I can tell, has not changed greatly.

40:42

And it still lacks the right to perform the song. Now in Australia, there is no religious exemption for churches to perform a religious song.

40:53

And so in other words, Australian churches, of which there are probably hundreds of thousands, or at least tens of thousands, subscribing to CCLI, thinking that they have the right to sing and perform the song when they actually don't.

41:09

Because the license they're paying for doesn't give them the right, and there is no exemption in Australian law.

41:15

Now that doesn't necessarily mean that churches in Australia are breaking the law. When I asked

41:20

CCLI about this, they referred me to this other organization called APRA, which handles performance rights in general.

41:29

So not just for Christian music. And it turns out they have a religious exemption. So the exemption isn't in the law, the government law, there's an exemption in this larger organization that handles royalty payments.

41:43

But this is all very confusing, because they're not a government agency, they're just another secular organization.

41:50

And so how exactly this works is very confusing. But at the very least, it seems like this could change at any time.

41:57

And so all that organization needs to do is decide, we're not going to give an exemption to churches anymore.

42:03

And then that's it, then churches have to figure something else out. So exactly what's going on,

42:09

I'm not sure, I reached out to them and haven't got a response, but it all seems very gray. But the interesting thing about all of this is that you've got the

42:18

US government, and you've got this secular organization in Australia, both of them granting an exemption to churches to perform songs for free.

42:28

And so it seems like the secular world, secular government and secular organizations, think that worship in church should be free.

42:37

And yet, what's ended up happening is that Christians themselves have stepped in and said, yeah, well, there may be an exemption, but you still need to pay us for copying lyrics and stuff, right?

42:51

And probably when these laws were put in place, that wasn't a big issue, because people were just singing off by heart, or they didn't think through the need to copy lyrics and things like that.

43:00

And there was no projection of lyrics. And so it seems like the secular government and organizations have tried to make music free in worship services.

43:11

And then later on in history, Christians have tried to take that back and tried to take money from churches, really backwards, really bizarre.

43:20

So practically, how difficult will it be for church to move away from this?

43:26

And what's your all's church situation with CCLI, and how far away have you all moved from it at this point?

43:33

My church, I'm still stuck with them. I think it's going to be a big transition for my church to move to free music, because they're so familiar with all the modern music, and just commercializing it is just so ubiquitous that it's very hard to find a popular

43:50

Christian artist that doesn't commercialize their music. So I think the transition to free music will happen, but it will probably take some years to happen, to build a culture where people care about this, where they care how much this dishonors

44:05

God, how much this insults him. And once ordinary

44:11

Christians and pastors have that conviction, then I think things will start to change. But until there's that conviction, people will just stick with the songs they like and know.

44:21

Yeah. You said at your current church, you're stuck with them for now. I assume you meant

44:26

CCLI, right? Not your church. Not your church members. That's right. Yeah. Yeah.

44:32

So our church, we do sing a lot of old hymns. Now, these hymns have been rearranged and put into a hymn book that was published some decades ago that still, whatever small changes they've made are still copyrighted.

44:47

But we're largely singing from a hymn book, but we occasionally sing from prints in a bulletin for some modern

44:54

Getty song or something like that, right? And we don't have a projector, so we're not able to just say, oh, we're displaying, we're not printing.

45:04

And so that's kind of my biggest hangup right now to making the transition is if we were projecting them, then

45:11

I'd argue for let's make the switch now. But given that we're not, I don't want to put us in a position where I have to make that argument to people that, oh, we should just throw caution to the wind.

45:24

Yeah. Andrew, how about you? Since I live in Mexico, no church knows what

45:29

CCLI is. Yeah. And that's the other thing about this situation. You know,

45:34

I've read artists comment that they're so encouraged that their songs are being sung all over the world, including in persecuted countries.

45:44

In reality, those persecuted believers are singing illegally.

45:49

And the reason for that is because you have not given your music for free and you have not given people permission to translate it.

45:57

And so these churches are no doubt not paying royalties. They don't have permission to translate the songs.

46:03

And you're saying you're encouraged by that when you're actually making them a lawbreaker by your practices of not releasing your music for free.

46:10

Yeah. And that's a common thing that people point to to justify this. They say, oh, well, you know, they wouldn't actually pursue legal action against people in these other circumstances.

46:18

But who's making these rules and who's deciding, you know, at what point they pursue legal action at what point they don't.

46:25

It's all I don't want to say arbitrary because I don't think it is arbitrary, but it's not good to make those who care most about following the law.

46:33

You know, that's that's the one who this ends up affecting, right, is the ones who want to follow the law are affected by this, not the ones who don't.

46:41

And in a lot of ways, it's like, I've heard people call this a narco tyranny, where you have a set of rules, or you have so many rules that people can't follow them.

46:51

Or in this case, you would have a rule that applies to so many people, but few follow it. So that if you ever do want to get at someone, you can because chances are they're not following this rule.

47:02

Narco tyranny, you said? Yeah, right. Okay. Yeah, because it's anarchy because no one's following the rules.

47:08

But it's also tyranny because there are rules that can be enforced when they want to enforce them. Oh, that's fantastic.

47:15

I like that. And I will mention, you know, just to clarify, in Mexico, it's not like they're not singing songs that are copyrighted.

47:23

They're singing lots of Hillsong and other translated songs into Spanish. Yeah, and it's not like they're exempted from this either, right?

47:31

Because international copyright agreements apply to Mexico as well. It's not like, oh, well, they just don't have the same laws in Mexico.

47:38

No, these are international laws we're talking about. They might be US copyright laws that then apply in Mexico because of an agreement, but it still applies there.

47:45

And they're definitely streaming. Many people are streaming now just because of COVID, of course.

47:51

And so, yeah, it's definitely happening. And, you know, this is an area that I'm really waiting to see some testimonies of people releasing their stuff.

48:02

We've heard a lot of great news about big publishers like United Bible Societies and Biblica starting to release things under open licenses, and it's been really encouraging.

48:15

But so far, to me, this is one of those areas where there's this complete lack of any movement in this direction of real testimonies of people saying, hey,

48:24

I'm releasing my whole catalog or whatever, especially a well -known stuff. So I'm really looking forward to that.

48:31

Yeah, I'm hoping to meet more and more people that start doing that, which will be really encouraging because as soon as we get a substantial body of music, it will be easy to transition to that.

48:42

You don't have to, you don't necessarily have to a lot, you know, how many churches, how many songs can you sing in one year in a church?

48:49

You don't need that many, really. But one other thing I wanted to point out is that CCLI is trying to expand.

48:57

And so they, I was amazed, actually, I'm looking at their Africa page right now, and they have expanded to four, eight, sixteen countries in Africa.

49:06

And you know, this is, these are probably some of the poorest, the poorest countries in the world that are now being burdened by these copyright law issues and licensing issues.

49:19

Asia is a lot less, only four countries in Asia. Again, a lot of countries in Asia face a lot of persecution too.

49:28

So yeah, this is why this needs to stop before CCLI starts expanding any further.

49:34

Yeah. And I'd also like to point out that, you know, not to go into too deeply to, you know, a theology of government and the role of government and laws like this, but I know a lot of people have the mindset that I originally did a long time ago, you know,

49:47

Bible says we should respect the government, we should obey the laws. And so therefore, the right thing to do is to follow all the steps, you know, register with CCLI, etc.

49:56

But once you, you know, start realizing whether or not you go spend some time in Mexico or some other country or not, and realize just how many churches are doing this without knowing that this is a law, without, you know, even the ones that do know, they would never even think to bother because it just seems so far beyond what's reasonable to do, you begin to realize maybe there isn't a whole lot of legitimacy to this particular thing.

50:23

And it isn't just a given that the right course of action is to pay the worship tax.

50:31

And to encourage you all in producing free music, things like that, Andrew is now going to, on the spot, produce a free song for you to hear.