Re: Recording church anthems for fund-raising CD - copyright costs

Date: Sat, 15 Feb 2003 10:25:00 GMT
Newsgroups: rec.audio.pro
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"Scott Dorsey" <email-address-deleted> wrote in message
news:b2j060$rgt$email-address-deleted...
> You can get a smaller number of units but only by negotiating with the
> individual rights holders. This is a pain in the neck and will cost you
> more in time than HFA will cost you in money.
Normally I wouldn't even say anything after Scott has made a post as he's
forgotten more than I'll ever now but I really recommend tracking down the
individual copyright holders. With the Internet this is a snap. I just did
this the day before yesterday (and it was the first time I'd ever done
anything like this). It's a gospel CD of which I'm making 200 copies and
half of the songs were so obscure it was hard to even find the most basic
information. But in one single day I tracked them all down, made the calls
to each one, and got a response. This took all of one day even though I had
sixteen songs. Three of the songs I found out were public domain even though
some publishers were listing themselves as owner (probably because they had
an arrangement but I wasn't doing their arrangement) and I would have ended
up paying them for no reason. Out of the thirteen songs left, four copyright
holders gave me permission to use theirs freely. I was able to find the
publishers of all the remaining songs but one outside of using Harry Fox. So
in the end my project that using Harry Fox could have cost $640 for
publishing alone ended up costing me only $184. That's a savings of over
70%. In fact the one song I am using Harry Fox for accounts for over 20% of
the copyright cost even though it's only 1/16 of the CD.
I believe you said you were doing a gospel CD. If so, here's a link that
might help:
http://www.ccli.com - especially look under the first page (once you get
into the site for your country) under Visitors for "Song Search" or "Song
Select". This will give you practically all the information you'll need.
It'll bring up a user account asking for password, etc. but you can use it
freely for what you are looking for by clicking on "My Church hasn't
purchased the Lyric Service...take me to Song Search"