Chances are you have been livestreaming your worship services for the better part of a year. And, realistically, livestreaming is probably here to stay, even when we are all back to hugging, laughing, singing, shaking hands, and generally congregating in large groups again.
So, now is the time to get your questions about music licensing and livestreaming answered by the experts. We are so excited to bring you this webmaster class, along without friends from One License, so you can get yourself set straight on how to use your music appropriately online.
Andrew Yeager-Buckley:
Hi, my name is Andrew Yeager-Buckley and I serve as the director of operations for Worship Times. I want to welcome you to this week's web masterclass on Music and Live Streaming, featuring three members of the onelicensed.net staff. Our goal from the very beginning of launching this weekly series was to provide support and encouragement for our Worship Times' partners and friends. This series gives us an opportunity to share best practices and tips on how to manage your website and optimize all the tools available. During the past year, we've also felt a strong call to offer general communications and digital worship support for church leaders.
We are so very excited to bring you this week's class. Ministries across the country have been live streaming or prerecording worship and prayer services for the better part of a year. If I had to create a top 10 list of topics church leaders have asked for guidance on over the last year, how to use music appropriately and legally online would probably be near the top. To make sure we offer the facts and not my interpretation, I reached out to the staff of One License and they generously agreed to partner with us on this presentation. We'll be monitoring the chat throughout and I encourage you to use the Q&A tool built in to Zoom to ask questions and we'll get to those at the end of the presentation. Now I'd like to welcome Brenna Cronin, Katie Deaver and Sierra Ronning and I believe that Brenna is starting things off. Welcome, thank you all.
Brenna Cronin:
Well, welcome again, everyone. We're so thrilled to be here and thank you again, Andrew, for having us as well. Just to give you a little bit of an idea of what our agenda looks like today, we'll be covering a couple of different topics from a presentation standpoint and then we'll go to that Q&A at the end. We'll start with an overview of copyright and our vision for licensing, some of our premier member publishers, the all-important and difficult and that's why it's assigned to me topic of avoiding penalties for noncompliance, some of the challenges facing churches and the pandemic right now, elements of justice and then we'll turn over to some infographics and talk about some more license types and that's where Sierra and Katie will jump in with their presentations.
We'll talk a little bit about posting best practices including your services online, displaying permissions and copyright claims and then a little bit of a conclusion and a wrap up and then an invitation to watch our new user webinar. I want to lead with that and say that I know that presentations like this can feel like drinking from a firehose in an already really stressful season, in an already chaotic time where there's so much that's being expected of us, personally, professionally and otherwise. If this feels like too much, the power of technology means that you can pause and you can rewind and re-watch at a later time, not only this presentation, but also our new user webinar as well, which you can find on our blog. If you get too overwhelmed today, don't worry, know that we are here to help and you can re- watch any of our personal videos, anytime.
We'll head to a Q&A after that, so let's go ahead and get started with something really exciting. We have a new user promotion just for you folks that are watching either today or maybe watching after the fact. We'll have this going for the next month. As long as you use this code by March 18th, it will be just fine, but this is a new user promotion. If you have never had a license with our service before and you want to save 10% off of your bundle purchase, so brand new to our service is the first key point. The second key point is that you have to be purchasing a bundle license which is the annual plus podcast streaming, so it gives you those reprint permissions and the podcast streaming permissions as well.
You can use the code WORSHIPTIMES10 on our website for that new license purchase. If you have any questions or have a hard time using the promo code, just send us an email info@onelicense.net and we'd be happy to help. All right, my friends, I want to take a moment and just acknowledge some of the really difficult challenges that we want you to know that we're aware of. I want to just be very clear about the fact that we're living in a really, really difficult time and we're aware of that. There are pandemic difficulties that are having some of our users take on new roles that they've never been expected to do.
You may be the treasurer of your church and now you're finding yourself having to learn about copyright and about posting your services online. You may be a volunteer who was voluntold to attend this webinar today. We just want to acknowledge that that's a really real element, right? We're all taking on new roles and new responsibilities. There's already a big element of turnover that exist in ministry. It's real. It's a part of what we deal with. If you are brand new to all of this, again if you're feeling like this is just going to be a firehose conversation for you, just know that we're holding space for you in that.
There's also a really real reality that copyright education may not have been offered to you previously in a previous rule or perhaps at your university if you did happen to study music or to study ministry, so we welcome those folks here as well today. There's also perhaps some confusion and practices. We are very clear about the fact that our member publishers who participate on our service are still very much in control of their copyrights. If they offered a gratis permission during the pandemic, if they offered a certain period of time where permissions were discounted or gratis or something like that, they're allowed to do that. It's well within their right to be able to do, so certainly welcome those of you who have maybe had some confusion about not really knowing where or who you should be going to for your permissions in this season. Moreover than anything, I want to thank you all for being here and for taking that first right step.
Copyright is a form of intellectual property law. Copyright is a form of intellectual property law. It protects works of authorship. Any type of artistic medium, whether it's literary, dramatic poetry, novels, even computer software can have a copyright to it. Whatever the work is, it must be in a fixed, intangible medium, so you can't copyright an idea. I'll encourage you, if you've got a really good idea right now that you write it down and you figure out a way to copyright it because you can't copyright an idea. It must be in a fixed medium. To use copyrighted music, you need permission and that permission typically comes from the copyright holder.
Here at One License, we've made that process significantly easier for you. Take a look at that word One in front of License. For the vast majority of you, you'll only have to come to one place really and truly to get the licensing coverage that you need. There are other licensing services that are out there that cover different copyrights and that cover different member publishers, but if you're more of a liturgical leaning church or the music that you use is more liturgical in nature, it likely comes from our service. Our vision for licensing is that we provide a proactive and educational approach to copyright law which is the reason why we are here today. We know that you want to do the right thing. There is some really important stuff that I'm going to share in a couple of slides, but I don't want you to lose sight of this piece that's so important for us right here.
We are here from a place of education. We are here from a place to help you. Our whole entire business exists to help you. We know that you want to do the right thing. I don't think anybody gets into ministry to not do the right thing. We're all natural do-gooder, helper-ey read people, so just know that we acknowledge that and we see that. You wouldn't, as one of my colleagues would say, steal candy from a store and we know that you wouldn't want to steal music either. We're here to help and we want to help you in that effort, all right? No scary police sirens really and truly. We're here to help.
We promise you a song database that is clean and accurate. We currently have over, it just got updated, 127,000 titles and it comes from over 300 different member publishers. Just last week alone, this is a hot tip for all of you, we're announcing it in our newsletter next week, Lorenz Publishing added 15,000 titles last week. It's a very big deal. It's a massive undertaking that Mark Hoff and [Chris Comp 00:08:48] and their team were working on. We're incredibly grateful to them, so an additional 15,000 titles. It's really exciting. We serve the global church, but we specialize in Roman Catholic and mainline Protestant organizations.
We have plenty of bilingual music on our website. We offer over 25 different languages of music, but for the vast majority of our service, it's for the English-speaking church. We also serve a variety of schools, retreat centers, religious communities, retirement homes, hospital chapels, funeral homes and really anywhere that the faithful gather, so you don't have to be a church to have a license with our service. We work with a variety of different organizations. We have, like I said, over 300 different member publishers. Some of them are listed here and you likely recognize a lot of their names. Like I said, the music on our service tends to be more liturgical in nature.
We have a page on our website where we're constantly updating the member publishers that we work with, so you can take a look at that anytime. If the information that you're looking at perhaps in your hymnal or in an octavo or in another type of resource, take a look at the bottom, see what the copyright information is on that specific song, then go to our website and see if we happen to cover that copyright holder. All right, my friends, big deep breath. Here is some of the scarier information, but again like I said, we come at this from a place of deep education.
I want to first bring acknowledgement to Mary Rhodes, who's an attorney with the Archdiocese of Washington, DC and thank her for her research on this piece that I'm going to share here. Typically, the copyright owner decides if and what a violator would pay. This can include two different pieces. It can include damages suffered, so think of this as like a sales loss or it can also include any type of profits from the violation, so thinking about if you have a video that goes viral, and you've got 20,000 people that watch it and it's monetized on YouTube and there's ads, and there's all kinds of income that's being generated from it, if there's no license that's in place. The copyright holder might decide that there are some profits that should have been earned there and damages suffered.
I'll also mention that there are statutory damages. They have ranged and we've seen this to anywhere from $750 to $30,000 per work. It typically, I would say, refers to how big of a fish it is, so how significant your organization is or how significant the egregious issue was. Mary has seen damages up to $150,000. I've never seen that, but certainly a scary number when you think about how the vast majority of our organizations can get a license from us for only a couple of $100. Who can be held liable? Certainly the church, certainly the physical building, the physical operation.
Again, like I said, we work with retreat centers, schools, religious communities, et cetera, but I'll also offer, and this is part of the reason why we're having this conversation today, supervisors have been held liable as well, whether that is you've just taken on a new role as a new choir director and you walk into your office and there's a massive file cabinet of photocopied music that in theory wasn't copied by you and maybe you didn't even know was there. If you're still in that position at that time, there's a chance that you could be held liable for that. Again, it's really up to the copyright owner to decide how far they want to go with this. It's my job to educate and to inform you about what the options are or what it could look like. I have been in choirs where I open up a folder of music and I take a look at that copyright information at the bottom and it very clearly says that it can't be photocopied. There's a moment where you're expecting your choir members to either not say anything or perhaps say something and look for clarification and then they're put in a really bad position.
Just in general, it's something you want to avoid. You want to make sure that the works that you're using, regardless of who they're for are licensed appropriately. Our service covers congregational reprints. If you're looking for choral reprints, ask the publisher, ask the copyright holder and see what their process is. It's really important that we're not putting our acquires or anybody else in a position where they feel like they have a moral obligation to do something. It just feels really tricky, so I want to hold space for that. We get this question a lot, "Will we really get caught?" and my friends, I want to hold space for maybe where the intention comes from with that question. This is a justice issue for us.
I'll share a little bit more about that in a moment, but I think above and beyond that, with the increase in technology, there are programs that are using content recognition software. Sierra is going to talk a little bit about this too. They scan the internet and they find potential copyright violations. You may have a bot that listens to five or six seconds of your video and then wants to put a copyright claim on it. Some of these are processed by real humans and some of these are processed by computers. We have a really hard time justifying to our license holders if they're not including licensing information. Perhaps they don't even have a license with us in the first place and they're posting their services online.
Well, we can help you get it figured out, but what's the intention in the first place? Why was that video posted without permission in the first place? It's a concern that we have and it's something that we want to make sure that we're talking about. Facebook, YouTube and other sites absolutely monitor for violations. Parishes posting their services online have gotten all kinds of copyright violations during the pandemic, especially with the increase in posting services online. I want to highlight here that a claim is different than a strike. We'll talk more about that later on too. A claim on a video is not a problem. In fact, it's something that happens quite often in an effort to monetize a video. You're moving to the internet folks. You're working with a business, a for-profit entity, so there's always an element of monetization that could be there.
I'll point out too that copyright owners have up to three years to find violations and to file a lawsuit. Just really tricky stuff and stuff that I don't want to dwell too much on, but it's something that's really important and I want you to be aware of it. Your solution is One License. Your Solution is One License and we're here to help. Folks, for us, it's a justice issue, it's a paramount importance. We know these artists, we know these publishers, we know these composers, you likely do too. Maybe you've met them at a conference or a convention or perhaps you've been to one of their concerts or you read their books, you're loyal to certain publishers or to certain composers. It's their livelihood and we pay out royalties to two decimal points based on what our users report to us. This piece is really important. Those moneys, those royalties allow them to continue their ministries and to create even more beautiful music for us, so it's just so important.
About 93% of our license holders report a song in a given week. For those of you who are license holders with us, we thank you for staying on top of your reporting. If you're behind, we can talk about that and help you get all caught up, just so everyone's aware royalties are paid to publishing houses and then they're passed on to those artists in their own individual agreements that publishers have with them. I want to highlight something in particular here about like where you go from here, right? If you are having this moment where you're having a little bit of a gut check and you're thinking, "Wow, yeah. I think we posted something earlier in the pandemic. We didn't know how or we tried to get permission and no one replied," reach out to us, send us an email, send us a link.
One would argue that if you don't have permission, you need to take down that video. That's like a no-questions-asked situation, but if you want us to research it for you, if you want us to take a look at it and see if it's something that we are able to help you license, send us an email info, I-N-F-O, @onelicense.net and we'd be happy to take a look at that for you. I'll note that there are exceptions to all of this, right? Some things in the public domain, so 70 years after the death of the author, that's typically referred to as public domain. Sometimes it's 95, depending on the territory.
Silent Night, you don't need permission. You don't need reprint permission. You don't need licensing permission from anybody to use Silent Night. However, if somebody who is a living composer wrote an arrangement for Silent Night, then absolutely yes, you would need permission because it's from a living arranger of a public domain piece. If you have written permission from the copyright holder, so say you did reach out to the publisher directly for a one-time permission for something and you have that in writing and that's something that you can prove or our service which allows you to have licenses that we're going to cover your music.
Again, our team is here and we're happy to help. We really truly believe in the education element of this. It's of paramount important to us. I'm going to stop my screen share here and I'm going to pass it over to Sierra, our multimedia specialist. She has some really fantastic stuff that she's going to share with you. Thanks for listening, everybody. I appreciate it.
Sierra Ronning:
Thank you, Brenda, for that great overview and introduction to One License. Now that you have this background information and you know you need a license, where do you start? I'm going to go ahead and take you to our homepage. I'm going to show you some processes that can help you find which license you need. All right, once you're on our homepage, I know Katie shared this link in the chat, so it is there for you, I recommend starting with going to our How It Works page. Once this loads up, there's all sorts of great information here about the different licenses. We offer some tutorial videos which are excellent resources if you're just getting started and the infographics.
This is something new that we are offering and I highly recommend when you're making this decision as to which license you need that you look at our Which Music Copyright License Do I Need Infographic. When you're looking at this, you will be able to decide or find which license you need based on two simple questions and it is loading, so thank you for your patience. The first question it will ask you is, "Are you meeting in person or are you meeting online?" Once you be able to answer that you can say, "Yes, we're meeting in person only," or, "We're meeting online only," or "It's a mixture of both." I know that is an option for a lot of people right now. Personally, the congregation I work with is only meeting online right now.
The second question is asking if you are reprinting your texts or music notations in any way. That can look like it could be included in a bulletin, a worship aid or maybe even it's a projection or you're adding it to your video to help encourage people to be singing along from home. You can answer yes or no to that and that will lead you to which license you need. You will see that you can either have a limited podcasting license or an annual plus podcast streaming license bundle. I'll go ahead and share this link in the chat while Katie takes it away to tell you a little more about these licenses.
Katie Deaver:
Awesome. Thank you, Sierra. Once you've taken a look at those great infographics and figured out which license is the best fit for your organization and what you're doing with worship right now, then you can start to really take advantage of all that these licenses allow you to do. Regardless of what type of license you decide on, a really great place to start is making sure that the music that you like to use is covered under those license permissions. In general, if the title is by one of our member publishers and that member publisher participates in our podcast streaming permissions, then you can be relatively confident that that title is going to be covered.
All of our member publishers have complete control of their own catalogs and what they add to our database including downloads or what they allow for their own catalog. There are occasionally exceptions to what's covered, but you can easily search our website for your favorite titles even before purchasing a license, and then once you have purchased the license and are able to log into your account, we have even more tools and tutorials that will help you to make sure that the music you're using is covered.
You are going to want to keep in mind, our podcast streaming license are designed to allow you to record or live stream original content that you or someone in your organization has created, so your license doesn't allow for the use of master or professional recordings within your videos nor can you use, say, a YouTube link or a lyric video that you didn't create within your worship video. You can get permissions for master recordings, but those need to be obtained directly from the publisher and/or the copyright holder. In the case of those YouTube videos, you also need the permission of the creator of that video that you want to use.
Here are just a couple of helpful specifics on how to go about using each of our podcast streaming licenses. The limited podcast streaming option is indeed limited and that it doesn't allow for any reprinting of any kind, so no text, no melody, nothing like that. This license gives you the correct permissions for those copyrighted titles that you're hearing in your live stream, right? So you're covered organ prelude and postlude, piano music, choral anthems, the singing of those hymns, not the reprint of them, but you're welcome to put those services on any platform that works for you, so Facebook, YouTube, your church's website, Zoom, Vimeo, anything else you can think of. We've also recently had questions, it's just fine to have them multiple places, so Facebook and YouTube and your church's website, all of that is just fine.
The other option is that annual and podcast streaming bundle license. This option is going to be the most versatile and comprehensive as far as what you need to combine, reprint with those podcast streaming permissions. This bundle license allows you full reprint permissions as well as provides you with those correct permissions for what the license does, all of the music you're hearing in these videos. This is a really excellent option for those of you who maybe are holding small in-person gatherings at this point and you're printing a worship aid or projecting the text for the hymns for that, but you also have a service you're putting online, right? You need both sides have those permissions.
This license is really versatile and that it also gives you the option to include the text in your online service or you could email the worship aid to your congregation each week or maybe for folks that have a little more tech savvy congregations, you could even create a password protected space on your website where folks can go and download that hymn text and melody line and have that with them when they're participating in your Zoom service. There really are so many options to be able to make these licenses work for you. There's so many creative ways that folks are finding to put these licenses to use. Now I'm going to turn things back over to Sierra and she's going to share some really specific examples of all of those best practices for posting and holding these live services online.
Sierra Ronning:
Awesome. Thank you, Katie. When it comes to just putting your services online and making sure that you are there, I say the scary word incompliance, it's all about displaying your permissions. I'm going to share with you just a little graphic I put together for you all today. This is what we're talking about when we're saying display in your permissions. You need to be displaying the copyright information for all the music included in your service. Let me repeat, all the music. I know, generally when it came to reprint before we were streaming online, we were used to recording and sharing information for congregational song only, but when you are streaming your service, all the music, so the preludes, the postludes, choral anthems, et cetera. All the music. All the copyright information for those songs need to be included.
You also need to include a line about your One License licensing permissions. This is the information that you need to be including in your service. We will make sure that you get a copy of this graphic for your use. Some ways that this can be shown in your worship are just you have all the options available to you. I've seen people put it in a slide in the beginning or end of their service if they have editing capabilities. Some people add it to the song title themselves. I'm going to pull up a blogpost. This is our blog, news.onelicense.net, and I'm going to pull up our Not Just A Quick Fix article that Katie and I got to work on. This has some great examples of what this can look like in your service.
Let's scroll down down here. You will see, for editing, is we've got this example of a slide that was included at the end of a service that I got to work on and you'll see all of the copyright information as well as their One License permissions. This is another example. They put it under the title of the song while they were introducing it. That is another option. Again, the options are endless. However you do it is up to you. We just ask that the information is there. For those of you who do not have editing capabilities and you're just setting up a camera or a phone or computer and saying, "We're going live now," totally get it. That's a great option for some people.
When you're doing that, you still need to include this information somewhere and we recommend that you add it to the description of your video. This is what would pop up like on Facebook. This is key. This helps let Facebook, YouTube or whoever you're using, it lets them know that you have permission to share this copyrighted works. Even if you are including it embedded in your videos such as these slides, we recommend that you put this information under the description of your video as well just to help deter those bots that are listening and screening your videos.
Sierra Ronning:
Now, if you don't know where to look when you're going live and you're like, "I don't know where to put the description, let me show you. You're on Facebook and you say, "Let's go live." The screen will pop up with all the information you need to get started. Over here on the left side, you will see a place to put your title, right underneath where it says, "Say something about this live video." That is where you're going to want to put the description information, so you can say, "Hi, welcome to our service. It's the first Sunday in Lent. Here are the songs that are used," list the copyright information and then follow that with your One License licensing permissions.
On YouTube, it is a little different. Let me go ahead and show you what that looks like. It'll say, "Create and go live." They will ask you if you want to go live right away and if you want to use your webcam, etcetera. Let's go ahead and start that. Let's go. Don't worry, we're not actually going to go live on my YouTube channel, but you'll see that you can put the title here, and again, the description part is not super obvious at this point. You need to hit more options and it will pop up below at description. Again, this is where you're going to want to share that copyright information and your One License licensing permissions.
Now once you've done all of that, you are set, you have done your video, you are good to go. What now? Report. Please make sure that you are reporting. This is instrumental to what One License does. Your reports allows us to pay out royalties to the publishing companies, the authors, the composers, the artists that are working on this and those royalties allow them to then go back and make more beautiful works for us to be able to share in our worship services. Those are my best practices for you. I hope that is helpful.
Brenna Cronin:
Sierra, thank you so much, Katie, so much. This is just awesome and I'm seeing some really fantastic questions in the Q&A too. We've answered all of them so far, but I think for those watching on Facebook and those watching after the fact, it would be good for us in a minute to just repeat some of those questions and answer them out loud. As our team lands the plane before we invite Andrew back, I want to bring your attention to just a couple of things that you can find on our website. Our website is onelicense.net, right? The name of the company is One License, but the website is onelicense.net.
If you put the word news in front of that web address, so news.onelicense.net, it will take you to our blog. Our blog has so much information on it. We were showing some of the posts from earlier, right? We just launched our new user webinar last week. We recorded it on February 9th. Again, it's this firehose moment, right? If you would rather watch an hour long webinar that you can pause and rewind, this is the webinar for you, so be sure that you take a look at that. Some folks were asking questions about different topics in the chat like best practices for posting services to social media. You can search the phrase social media and you can find this post. You can search the word podcast as in like podcast streaming and you might find a whole bunch of posts that would be helpful here for you.
Some folks were asking about virtual choir videos. We have a post that might be really helpful for you about that. Again, this feels like a firehose with a lot of information, but you can check out our blog and you can take a look at everything that we have to offer there, okay? Again, email us info@onelicense.net. If you have questions after the fact, we'd be happy to talk to you, but with that, I will hand it back to Andrew for a little bit of Q&A. Thanks, everybody.
Andrew Yeager-Buckley:
Thank you all so, so, so, so very much. Like Brenna mentioned, we did have a series of questions that came in and we were able to answer as part of the presentation, but then also at different times, different folks on the staff, we're able to offer written responses. I wasn't certain if there was any one of those in particular that you all wanted to offer maybe a little bit more of a verbal response. The one that caught my attention the most was, and I think we even discussed this as we were planning this that a big part of this was also just offering general education about this process, but offering an explanation of the different license companies and the specialties that the different ones, so you all, I think there was a little bit at the beginning of the presentation on the types of music view all, for lack of a better word, hold or protect or care for, but if you could just offer a little bit of an explanation of the different companies and the different types of licenses for different types of content being used in live stream services.
Brenna Cronin:
Absolutely. There are two major licensing companies that are out there. There's us that leans more liturgical in nature and then there's CCLI, that leans more evangelical or praise and worship in their style. It's likely totally possible that you have licenses with both. You may have licenses with one or the other depending on the style of worship or depending on finances, right? My church has a license with CCLI that just covers our high school youth group that meets normally regularly, not during the pandemic, but then they have a One License account that's larger that covers their regular weekend services. We'll leave the decision on that up to you, but you want to think about who licenses the copyrights that you are looking for. Just because you're Lutheran doesn't mean that you worship in a certain style, right? Be sure that you're taking a look at a variety of those different websites to see who is going to cover the music that you need.
In terms of the types of licenses that we offer, you can take a look at our options and prices page on the website. We break them down by territory, so it will automatically load in the region where you live, but you can take a look at the different licensing options and then the pricing is there as well. We believe in an equitable pricing model. This is really important to us. Small churches should pay a small amount and large churches should pay a large amount. It's all based on average weekly attendance. We know that numbers go up and down. We know that they go up around the holidays and they might go down around the summer. We know that right now things are really tricky. "Can you have a 20% capacity in your church? Are you full locked down?"
There's all kinds of different things that are happening in different regions and different states and maybe even different cities, right? Go ahead and send us an email if you're having a hard time figuring out what your number is right now and we can help you figure out some ways to think about that. We offer licenses, not only this annual license which is typically for non-school organizations, so think churches, think funeral homes, think retreat centers, but then we also offer school licenses. Those are intentionally lower priced because we know that schools don't meet 12 months out of the year, so there is a little bit of a discount that's filled in there for that.
You also have the option of purchasing a single use which is a 24-hour license or an event license which will allow you to have access up to seven days. If you've never used our service before and you want to create, for example, a tritium booklet that's going to cover Holy Thursday all the way through Easter Sunday, you can get yourself an event license that's going to cover that whole weekend and you'll be able to bundle that with podcast streaming permissions as well. I want to highlight the word podcast here for just a second. It's a colloquial word that we use that means prerecorded. Whether you're prerecording your services or whether you're posting them live, like Sierra talked about, your service is covered under our license.
I know that the Archdiocese of Chicago, for example, the beginning of the pandemic, was recording their services on Wednesdays and then they were going live on YouTube over the weekend, right? Whether you're prerecording or whether you're doing them live or maybe it's a mixture of the two, maybe you're prerecording a virtual choir video or you're prerecording certain musical pieces, but then the sermon is live for example, all of that is just fine. You can make whatever creative decisions are going to be best for you and your organization, but again, if you're brand new and you need an idea about the different license types that we cover, take a look at this options and prices page.
We have a limited podcast streaming license as well. It allows you to just post your services online. That's it. No inclusion of text or music, no PDF involvement of like a bulletin or a leaflet or anything like that, so it's really just a point and go kind of thing. Then we have a practice track license as well, which we can dive into if anybody has questions about that.
Andrew Yeager-Buckley:
One of the questions actually related to these different license levels that came in was asking about the quantifying of attendance. Does that a number include, let's say, if you are back to some version of in person and you have online, is the average weekly attendance including your in person and online or what do you all define when you think attendance?
Brenna Cronin:
Great question. You absolutely want to think about in person and online, right? People have different comfortability levels with what they're doing right now. Certainly, I can imagine that there are folks that might attend in person but then also watch it back, but I have to imagine that those folks might be few and far between. If, for example, you've got 20% capacity that's allowed right now, so let's say for you that's 100 people just for the sake of easy math, you then are taking a look at your videos and you have an average of about, let's say, another 100 or so people that are watching them online. If that gives you a number of around 200, you can take a look at these numbers right here and make sure that you're in the right category.
Of course, you need the license in order to post your service online, but if you want to edit your number or think about what that might look like, we'd be happy to help you work with that. Sierra has a fantastic post about YouTube analytics on the blog, so you can take a look at that. You can search the word YouTube or analytics. She's also going to put it into the chat for those of you who are here with us live, but I know some of you are watching on Facebook and you can't see the chat, but lots of options for how to figure out your attendance and know that we're happy to increase it or decrease it based on what your needs are. You just have to send us an email and we'll help you out.
Andrew Yeager-Buckley:
Great. I actually want to pick up one of the questions that was brought up by one of the participants. It was about videos after the fact, whether it was live streamed or prerecorded on YouTube getting flagged for copyright, even when you've included your license information. Personally, this is a mind numbing thing that drives me crazy for my own congregation because every time I feel like I finally have done it right and I've clearly communicated everything, I feel like honestly the times where I put forth more effort is when I get flagged and it's the times where I forgotten two songs completely and I've had to go back and edit, it never gets flagged.
Is there anything that can be done differently? I think you talked about, "Make sure it's in the description," but is there something else that we're supposed to be doing to make that information more obvious to the crawlers of YouTube that are just throwing off red alarms assuming that everything's wrong?
Brenna Cronin:
It's a great question and I appreciate it. Somebody asked that in the chat as well. Lisa, thank you. Sierra, I'll have you jump in here in just a second, but I do want to mention something that might sound obvious, but it's important to say out loud. You are not permitted to include commercial tracks in your service. There's a total possibility that you're including a commercial track, you're trying to upload that to the site. I guarantee you it will be flagged nearly immediately. Commercial tracks are not permitted. There's an expectation that when you're using our service, it's self-made, it's homegrown, right? You're creating it yourself. If you wanted permissions for commercial tracks, you would have to follow up with the copyright holder directly, but Sierra, feel free. Go for it.
Sierra Ronning:
This is a problem and I cannot wait to talk to someone at YouTube in the future. It's on my list, but yeah, the bots are really searching these videos to see, look for the licensing signs, but they're also trying to match sounds. If your performance sounds like a commercial recording, it's going to get flagged. Sometimes you will just sound too good which is such a great [crosstalk 00:41:12], right? As long as you have your permissions, you've done your due diligence, you've shared this copyright information, you're doing what's right. There's no real rhyme or reason why it's getting flagged other than it just matches a sound that the bots are searching for.
You can always dispute that claim then, make sure that you are including the information you have like, "Yes, this title and this song are from this publisher who are participating in the podcast streaming license with One License. Here is my One License number," then you can dispute it and YouTube and the copyright holder will be able to review that and release the claim.
Brenna Cronin:
Andrew, it's interesting, I shared this in a conversation that our team had earlier today, but we posted a video up on YouTube really recently. I'm laughing at myself because the general manager of One License should not be making copyright mistakes, right? Hopefully, there's a little bit of humor that might be helpful here for all of you. We posted a video to YouTube and it was just taking so long. It was taking forever to upload it. I let it go overnight, so it would just upload while I was attempting to sleep. Then it ended up being uploaded, but the details that I had added didn't go along with it.
There were 12 hours or so where there was no licensing or copyright information that was there because again the video transferred, but the description section didn't transfer and I had two flags on my account. I thought, "No way are there two flags on my account of all accounts," and I looked on there and it was because they weren't included. Here's the lesson, my friends. I added the description information for the licensing and copyright information and those two flags after I disputed them went away almost immediately.
Andrew Yeager-Buckley: Interesting.
Brenna Cronin:
I don't know if this is the way that it goes that these companies are just overwhelmed by flags and disputes that if they see something there, they're happier than not, but I think it makes a huge difference that something is listed really and truly.
Andrew Yeager-Buckley:
That makes sense. I think that we have one last person, Russ.
Russ:
We started live streaming our services. We were doing it ... I was stitching everything together manually before, but we have cameras and put the service together, posted on YouTube and I get the little YouTube claims that copyright claim that I didn't do something right. What I'm hearing from this service, I just want to make sure my takeaway is correct, that I would put, "We're obtain going to obtain a One Note or One License." We'll include that with each song pr do we just do it once for the service, the copyright information because I want these claims to go away? We're trying to play by all the rules, but we're just learning what the rules are.
Sierra Ronning:
Thank you, Russ. That is a great question. You only need to include the information in your service once. There are different ways that you can do this, but if you want to just go ahead in the description part for your YouTube video when you're going live, just include all the songs, all their copyright information and then you only need to include the One License licensing permissions line one time, but again that the blogpost about Not Just A Quick Fix, that shows you lots of great examples. I know it's in the chat. You can also email us and I would be happy to send that to you.
Andrew Yeager-Buckley:
That's great. Well, I want to thank you all so much. I think we're going to go ahead and close out. This is just so rich, filled with so much information. In some spaces, we needed to just scratch the surface, but in others, you all dove in all the way which is what I was hoping we could offer our friends and partners. One of the things I take away from the very beginning of presentation is we know you want to do the right thing and I feel like that was, even when I started conversations with you all, that was my hope, is that the fact is that we know the folks want to lean in towards doing the right thing, but often don't even know what step one is, let alone steps two or three and so can end up not doing the right thing with absolutely no ill intent.
I really appreciate you helping offer that guidance and support and just also I want to thank all of our partners and friends that joined us today. Just as a quick reminder, a video of this presentation will be available within the Facebook group but also on our website at worshiptimes.org. For those of you that are Worship Times partners, inside of that Worship Times dashboard where you manage your site, if you go in to the learning center, this video and all the previous webmaster classes along with our other training materials are available there and so you can look for that. I just want to thank you again for being with us and thanks to our friends at One License for their time.
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