The WorshipCommons License
Most music licensing is a subscription, a spreadsheet, and a lawyer. This is a page you can read out loud to your worship team.
If it happens in worship, it’s free, forever. Albums, films, and ticketed concerts stay with the writer.
The license — Version 1.0
1 · Worship Use. Using this song in worship — a service, camp, home, or any gathering held for worship, anywhere — and everything done to prepare for and share it: rehearsing, projecting, printing, arranging, translating, recording or streaming the gathering.
2 · The grant. Free, worldwide, forever. You don’t ask, register, report, or pay. This is the writer’s own permission, not a church exemption.
3 · Everything else stays with the writer. Selling recordings or sheet music, standalone releases, sync, and ticketed concerts need the writer. Skip a verse or translate it; don’t change what the song means.
These three paragraphs are a summary. The legal code is the license. If they disagree, the legal code controls.
WorshipCommons License, Version 1.0 — Legal Code
This is the license. The page at worshipcommons.org/license is a summary. If the summary and this text disagree, this text controls.
1. Definitions
Song means the words and music of the work this license is applied to, plus every recording and file the Writer shared with it and marked with this license.
Writer means each person or entity that owns rights in the Song and applies this license.
Worship Gathering means a gathering held for worship — including a service, camp, youth gathering, household or personal devotion, wedding, funeral, chapel, retreat, hospital or prison visit, or similar assembly — wherever it happens, in person or online.
Worship Use means singing, playing, or performing the Song at a Worship Gathering, and everything done to prepare for or share that gathering: rehearsing; projecting, printing, copying, and giving words or music to the people gathered without selling them as a product; transposing and arranging; translating; and recording or streaming that gathering, live or later.
2. Grant
The Writer grants everyone a free, worldwide, non-exclusive, perpetual, irrevocable license to use the Song for Worship Use.
You do not need to ask, register, report, or pay. You do not need to pass this permission along. Everyone already has it from the Writer.
3. What is not granted
Everything that is not Worship Use stays with the Writer and needs the Writer’s permission. That includes: selling recordings or sheet music; releasing a standalone track, album, or music video; using the Song in film, television, advertising, a podcast, a game, or another production; radio or television broadcast of the Song apart from sharing a Worship Gathering; and a ticketed concert where the performance is the product.
4. Changes
You may skip a verse, repeat a part, translate the Song, or change a word so it sings, as long as you do not change what the Song means or present a changed version as the original. Other lyric changes need the Writer’s permission.
5. If local law gets in the way
This license is meant to work in every country. Where local law will not carry all of it, the Writer grants as much as that law allows and promises not to sue anyone for Worship Use.
6. Credit, warranties, version
Crediting the Writer is appreciated and is not a condition of this license, except where the law requires credit. The Song is provided as-is, with no warranties, as far as the law allows. This license covers only rights the Writer actually holds.
Each Song carries the license version in effect on the day it was shared. Only someone who owns the Song can apply this license.