Sacred Music Licensing Checklist

Template only. Adapt to your production and have a lawyer review before use.

Sacred Music Licensing Checklist

This is a checklist, not a contract. Use it before you record a choir, lay a hymn under a scene, or let a character sing a verse of chant. Music is the clearance most often missed on Catholic productions, because sacred music feels like it belongs to everyone. Some of it does; much of it does not.

The rule of three

Every piece of music in a film carries up to three separate rights, and each needs its own permission:

1. The composition, and the arrangement. The melody and its harmony. Permission to put a composition into a film is a synchronization ("sync") license from whoever owns or administers it. If you use a published arrangement of a public-domain tune, the arrangement is its own copyrighted work and needs its own sync license, even though the tune is free.
2. The master recording. A specific recorded performance. If you use an existing recording you need a master-use license from whoever owns that recording: a label, a religious community, a parish, a publisher, an individual. Recording your own performance avoids this right; see "Recording your own choir" below.
3. The text and its translation. Lyrics are part of the composition, but liturgical and scriptural texts are often licensed separately. The modern English translations sung in most parishes, the current liturgical texts, and most contemporary hymn texts are protected and administered by their publishers. A verse sung on camera in a modern translation may need a text license even if the melody is centuries old.

What is usually free, and what usually is not

• Likely public domain: Gregorian chant melodies; Latin liturgical texts of long standing; hymn tunes and texts by composers and authors who died long ago; classical sacred works of the same era. Confirm the dates for each element (tune, text, arrangement) separately.
• Usually protected: any arrangement, harmonization or accompaniment published in recent decades; modern English hymns and their texts; contemporary praise and worship songs; the current English translations of the Mass texts and psalms; any recording made in living memory, however old the underlying music.
• The hymnal trap: the hymnal in the pew is a licensed collection. The tune may be free, but the harmonization on the page, the English words and the typesetting usually belong to the hymnal's publisher or to the writers it licenses.

Who you will be dealing with

Know which category each element falls into; each licenses on its own terms:

• Liturgical-text bodies that hold the current English translations of the Mass, the Lectionary and the psalter.
• Catholic hymnal and missal publishers that own or administer most of the hymns, psalm settings and Mass settings sung in American parishes, and the arrangements printed in their books.
• Contemporary worship-music administrators that license praise and worship catalogs.
• Religious communities and their labels for recordings of chant and polyphony by monks, nuns and cathedral choirs.
• Individual composers and cantors, especially for locally written settings, who may hold everything themselves.

Ask early: quotes take time, and the answer may change what you shoot.

Recording your own choir

If a parish choir, schola or cantor records for the film:

• ☐Sync license, or documented public-domain status, for each composition and arrangement they will sing.
• ☐Text license if they sing a protected translation.
• ☐A performer release from every singer and instrumentalist (use the Talent / Appearance Release), with a parent's signature for children.
• ☐Written permission from the parish or community to record in its space and, if you will, to identify it (use the Location Agreement).
• ☐Agreement with the music director on credit and on whether the recording may be used beyond the film (soundtrack, trailer, social clips).

Ask the parish music director first

The music director knows what the parish already licenses, which hymnal edition it uses, which settings are locally composed, and whom the parish calls with rights questions. Ten minutes with the music director will save weeks.

Document every clearance

Keep a music cue sheet for the film with one row per cue:

• Cue number, scene, and timecode in and out.
• Title, composer, arranger, lyricist, translator.
• Use: background, on-camera performance, source, main or end title.
• Composition status: public domain (with the evidence) or licensed (licensor, license date, term, territory, media, fee).
• Master status: original recording (with the performer releases) or licensed (licensor and terms).
• Text status: public domain or licensed.
• Where the signed paperwork is filed.

Distributors, festivals and insurers will ask for this sheet and for the licenses behind it.

Before you lock picture

• ☐Every cue on the sheet has all three permissions marked cleared, public domain (with evidence), or replaced.
• ☐Licenses cover the media and territory you actually intend (festival only, streaming, theatrical, worldwide) and the term you need.
• ☐Credits list composers, arrangers, publishers and performers as the licenses require.
• ☐The music director and choir have received the credit they were promised, and a copy of the film if that was the deal.