Your services are too long. If you have met all the other criteria (and listen to the podcast for all 8 reasons) you don’t want to upload a 75-minute service, or even a 40-minute sermon. Most popular Youtube videos are about 2 minutes long. People are not likely to sit in front of a screen to watch your entire service. The IRS may begin a church tax inquiry only if an appropriate high-level Treasury official reasonably believes, on the basis of facts and circumstances recorded in writing, that an organization claiming to be a church or convention or association of churches may not qualify for exemption, may be carrying on an unrelated trade or business.

1. Changing The Recordings Music For Your Church Services Online
2. Recording Church Services On Computer

Show notes and resources

• Stop! Don’t Record Your Church Services – the original blog post I wrote
• The most popular videos on YouTube are only 2 minutes and 1 second in length (Source)
• People decide if they’ll watch a video within 10 seconds (Source)
• The average American congregation is 75 people (Source)
• 90% of all American congregations have 350 people or less (Source)

3 Instant Takeaways

1. The cost is often prohibitive. It’s a lot cheaper now to produce good video than ever before. But you still need a minimum of two (and better to have three, four or five) cameras, software, a switcher for multiple angles, and people to man the cameras. The average-sized church would be stretching itself and the return on investment is usually minimal: only a handful of viewers watch the services.
2. Let’s be honest: sometimes the motive is simply ego. Pastors are often driven, results-oriented leaders — which is a good thing. But sometimes these personalities feel like they need to keep up with the bigger churches and do what they see in the media when, in fact, it’s just not practical at every level.
3. Your services are too long. If you have met all the other criteria (and listen to the podcast for all 8 reasons) you don’t want to upload a 75-minute service, or even a 40-minute sermon. Most popular Youtube videos are about 2 minutes long. People are not likely to sit in front of a screen to watch your entire service. A better option is to upload audio of your messages that people can listen to on the go.

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This might be old news to some, but in my research I found a fair amount of anecdotal “its ok” and some mis-information about the legalities of playing CD’s at a church service. I needed to figure it out and I wanted the hard facts – the law itself. This is what I’ve found out:

It is indeed legal to play the music from a CD as part of your service without violating the copyright. It doesn’t come from the fair use provision (US Copyright Law section 107 “Limitations on exclusive rights: fair use” ). This is a common misconception. It instead comes from section 110 “Limitations on exclusive rights: exemption of certain performances and displays” paragraph 3.

“(3) performance of a nondramatic literary or musical work or of a dramatico-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;”

So, it is fine to to play the CD as part of the service. Now, this doesn’t include projecting lyrics or printing guitar tabs or choir parts, etc.; that’s all under CCLI. This also doesn’t cover recording the audio as part of an audio or video recording – that’s a reproduction issue and paragraph 3 provides an exception for performance, not reproduction. Also, there probably is some question about if you want to play a CD as background at a church potluck. I suspect that since such a performance is not during the “course of services” that it would not be legal. But, that is outside of my initial search parameters for playing music during a church service proper.

Here are my key sources:

• US Copyright Office
• Presbyterian Church (USA) Legal Resource Manual

I hope this is helpful.

Changing The Recordings Music For Your Church Services Online

Recording Church Services On Computer

Tags: audio, ccli, church, copyright, exemption, fair use, music cd