Our guide to reporting with CCLI

February 27, 2024

When it comes to what we sing in church, we want to focus on the main thing – singing God’s praise and leading his people in worship. The more administrative side of your church’s weekly routine gets few headlines, but is important. If you are using copyright material, whether projected or on a printed song sheet, you need to be covered by a CCLI license, and that also means you must report what you use. As that is often a frustrating process, we’ve asked our copyright administrator, David Churchyard, to write a guide to help you. You may want to print off or save this email and keep it to hand for future reference.

Reporting Songs from the Praise Trust Website & Hymnbooks

CCLI relies on your reporting to distribute royalty payments fairly and accurately to the songwriters and publishers whose works your licences permit you to reproduce, copy or play. Likewise, Praise Trust also relies on this same commitment from churches to regularly report to CCLI.

Please refer to CCLI’s website for information about reporting under each of their licences.

Music Reproduction Licence

Making copies from publications, which includes websites, requires your church to first have a Music Reproduction Licence. All the copies you make must be reported to CCLI under that licence. Before reading on, please refer to CCLI’s short video-guide for reporting under the Music Reproduction Licence. You can find this by following the link above and scrolling to the bottom of the page. Alternatively, the video can also be found on YouTube.

Publication First

At Praise Trust, we recommend reporting by publication first, as described in the video-guide. This ensures that you first identify the correct Praise! publication, and then find the song(s) within it, making your report as accurate as possible. It is important that you identify the correct publication when reporting songs since this ensures the correct publisher receives their share of royalties. You can also report Church Copyright Licence activity using the ‘publication first’ method.

Websites are regarded as publications, just as if they were printed books. Therefore, copies of songs made from each of the following Praise! publications should be reported under the Music Reproduction Licence:

• Praise! (Music Edition) – The original Praise! hymnbook published in 2000.
• Praise! (Words Edition) – The words-only copy of our original hymnbook.
• www.praise.org.uk – The Praise! online subscription service website.
• Christmas Praise! – Our latest printed publication.

Identifying the Correct Publication

Searching for Publications in CCLI’s Online Reporting Tool might not always give you the results you expect. Consequently, even if you enter the exact publication name (e.g. “Praise! (Music Edition)” it may not appear at the top of the search results list, so make sure you find the correct publication before reporting your songs.

Search for www.praise.org.uk

Unfortunately, in order to find the Praise! website as a publication, you must enter the exact web URL (www.praise.org.uk) including the ‘www’. Anything other than the exact URL name will fail to find our website as a publication. CCLI is aware of this as an issue that requires attention.

CCLI’s Auto-Reporting

There are some great advances being made in trying to simplify the reporting process. However, please be aware that CCLI’s new Auto-Reporting does not include copies made under your Music Reproduction Licence – you will still need to do this using their online reporting tool.