Free and legal Christian music: where to get it, and what you may do with it

Search for free gospel music and you will find two kinds of page. Listicles naming twelve sites, half of which are dead and most of the rest are not what they claim. And download portals with a pop-under advert wrapped around the button, offering you somebody else's album for nothing.

There is a better answer, but it starts with an uncomfortable question: free to do what?

Free to listen to on your headphones is one thing. Free to project on a Sunday morning is another. Free to play behind a video your church posts on Instagram is a third, and it is the one that gets churches into trouble, because almost nothing is free for that.

So this page does both halves. Where the genuinely free material is, verified, with the dead links marked dead. And then what you may lawfully do with it, which is where I can tell you something a definitions site cannot, because I own the recordings of my own songs and have had to work out what I could honestly permit.

The earth is the LORD's, and everything in it, the world, and all who live in it.

Psalm 24:1, NIVUK

That verse is the reason this article is not a lecture about theft. Nobody writing a worship song made the raw material of it. But between God's ownership and yours sits a person who spent money and years, and pretending otherwise is not generosity. Both halves of that are true at once, and this page tries to hold them together.

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The short version

If you want the answer without the reasoning:

Everything below is why, and what you may do with each.

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What does "free" actually mean?

It means four different things, and they are not interchangeable. Public domain means nobody owns it. Creative Commons means somebody owns it and has granted permissions in advance. Royalty-free means you paid once instead of per use. And "copyright free" is not a legal term at all.

Most of the confusion in this whole subject comes from those four being used as if they were the same. They are not, and the differences are not academic. They decide whether your church is licensed or not.

Public domain means no copyright exists any more. Nobody owns it, nothing is required of you, not even a credit. In the UK a hymn text or tune enters the public domain seventy years after the end of the year its author died, under section 12 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. An author who died in 1955 came out of copyright at the end of 31 December 2025, so their work is free from 1 January 2026.

Creative Commons is not the public domain. It is a set of standard licences applied to work that is still in copyright, where the owner has granted permissions in advance on stated conditions. Break the condition and you are infringing again. Creative Commons themselves are clear that their licences should not be applied to public-domain material at all, because there is nothing left to license.

Royalty-free is the one that catches people, and it is worth saying flatly: royalty-free is not copyright-free. It is a pricing model. You pay once, or subscribe, instead of paying per use. The work stays fully in copyright, owned by somebody else, and your rights are exactly and only what the licence grants. One royalty-free library says so itself: "Royalty Free Music is NOT Copyright Free music." Such licences also typically exclude public performance, which is collected separately, so a royalty-free purchase does nothing for your position on a Sunday morning.

"Copyright free" is not a legal term at all. It appears nowhere in the Act, nowhere in Intellectual Property Office guidance, nowhere in a US Copyright Office circular. It is marketing language, sometimes meaning public domain, more often meaning royalty-free, sometimes meaning nothing. When you see it, go and read the actual licence.

The distinction that matters most

Here is the one to carry away, because everything else follows from it.

The song and the recording of it are two different copyright works, owned by different people, expiring on different dates.

Under UK law the words and music of a hymn are a literary work and a musical work under section 1(1)(a), timed by section 12: seventy years from the author's death. A recording of that hymn is a separate work under section 1(1)(b), owned by whoever made it, and section 13A times it completely differently. Fifty years from the end of the year the recording was made, or, if it was published or made available to the public inside those fifty years, seventy years from the end of the year that happened. The US Copyright Office puts it plainly: "a copyright in a sound recording is not the same as, or a substitute for, copyright in the underlying musical composition."

So "the hymn is out of copyright" tells you nothing whatsoever about whether you may copy a recording of it. Amazing Grace is from 1779 and John Newton has been dead since 1807. Every commercial recording of it made in your lifetime is fully protected.

The reverse is also true and much better news, and almost nobody mentions it. The extension from fifty years to seventy took effect on 1 November 2013 and it did not revive copyrights that had already expired. So UK sound recordings first published in 1962 or earlier are in the public domain. As the Open Music Archive puts it, "recordings made in 1962 or earlier remain in the public domain." That covers a great deal of early gospel, spirituals, and hymn singing recorded before the beat groups arrived.

And it can be worse than two layers. A public-domain hymn can be encumbered three ways at once:

• The arrangement. A modern arrangement of an ancient tune carries its own new copyright, running seventy years from the end of the year the arranger dies, which is usually far longer than seventy years from the arrangement. But it protects only what the arranger added. You remain free to make your own arrangement from the public-domain original.
• The typography. Under section 15, the layout of a published edition is protected for twenty-five years from publication. Photocopy a page from a 2015 hymnal and you infringe the publisher's typographical copyright until the end of 2040, even though the hymn on it is from 1650. To use the hymn lawfully you either set it yourself from a public-domain source or hold a licence that permits the copying, which is exactly what CCLI's Music Reproduction Licence is for, and why CCLI say permission is needed to photocopy typeset pages even of a song that is out of copyright.
• The recording, as above.

One more thing, if you are reading American guidance, and most of what surfaces for these searches is American. The public domain is not the same date in both countries. In the US, published works from 1930 and earlier are now clear, but sound recordings only from 1925 and earlier, because the Music Modernization Act of 2018 put pre-1972 recordings on a separate and later schedule (17 U.S.C. § 1401). That was an improvement on the state-law patchwork it replaced, which had protected some of them until 2067. A 1928 recording of an 1850 hymn is still in copyright in America. The UK works on entirely different rules, as above. A site being legal where it is hosted does not make it legal where you are.

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Where is the genuinely free Christian music?

Hymns and psalms are where free-and-legal actually works, because the songs are out of copyright and the people recording them are doing it to be sung rather than sold. For modern worship there is essentially one generous source, Life.Church Open, and for commercial Nigerian gospel there is none.

I checked every source below rather than repeating a list. Where something is dead, I have said so, because two of the best things in this field have closed and every listicle still recommends them.

Hymns and psalms: the strongest free material there is

Hymnal.net is the best of them and almost nobody names it. Full MP3s, complete song, singing version, verse by verse, plus MIDI and lead-sheet PDFs for piano, guitar and text. No email, no account, no interstitial. Their rights position is stated: hymns there are "either posted with permission or belong to the public domain," and they invite takedown notices. The recordings are devotional rather than commercial, which is the trade.

Hymnary.org is the reference library, over a million hymn texts, tunes and hymnals, incorporating the Dictionary of North American Hymnology. Free without logging in you get full texts, hymnal page scans, MIDI, audio, and often a score PDF. The paywall is narrow and honestly signposted: transposable printable "FlexScores" cost a few dollars. If you want to know who wrote something, when, and which hymnal it appeared in, this is the answer.

The Free Church of Scotland's praise resources deserve more attention from English churches than they get, because the permissions are written down in plain English rather than left to inference. Words-only PDFs of the Scottish Psalter and Sing Psalms, a music PDF of tunes "which are either already in the public domain or to which the Committee hold the copyright," PowerPoint and ProPresenter files for projection, and a free app. The 1650 Psalter psalms, they say, "may be reproduced in any form without copyright concerns." Sing Psalms may be reproduced without express permission for non-saleable media, up to six psalms at a time, with acknowledgement appreciated. That is what a clear permission looks like.

ThePsalmsSung.org advertises seven hundred free recordings of congregational and choral psalm singing, indexed by metre, drawing on Free Church of Scotland and Reformed Presbyterian Church of Ireland publications. Free to listen to, on the site and through Spotify, YouTube and SoundCloud. No reuse licence is published, so it is fine for listening and you should ask before republishing.

HymnServe is one woman, Elaine Johnson, giving away MP3 hymn accompaniments, mostly organ and piano. Her permission is unusually clear and worth quoting because so few do it: copying is allowed "provided it is for FREE distribution, provided NO ALTERATIONS are made, and provided this COPYRIGHT notice is included." If your church has no musician available, this is a real solution to a real problem.

The Cyber Hymnal holds over ten thousand hymns with lyrics, scores, audio and composer biographies, built by Dick Adams from 1996. It is a museum piece now: it expects MIDI software and did not negotiate HTTPS cleanly when I tested it. Check the address, though. The project operated at cyberhymnal.org until around 2009 before that domain was repurposed by a different site, and Hymnary notes that the site now calling itself NetHymnal at cyberhymnal.org "is not affiliated with The Cyber Hymnal™ in any way." The one you want is hymntime.com/tch. Hymnary also hosts a searchable index of it, which is an easier front door.

IMSLP holds 881,564 scores including a vast sacred choral repertoire: Byrd, Tallis, Bach, Handel, Stanford. Free. One caveat matters a great deal for British readers, and it is not the one people expect. IMSLP's main servers are in Canada and its copyright guidance is built around what is public domain there; works clear only in the US sit on separate servers. Until December 2022 Canada's term was fifty years from the author's death, against our seventy. So a score can be lawfully hosted as public domain in Canada and still be in copyright in the UK, for any composer who died between about 1956 and 1975. That is exactly the twentieth-century repertoire a church choir is most likely to want.

Two more, honestly qualified. Wikisource's hymn portal is live and maintained, holding texts and complete transcribed historic hymnals; the texts are public domain but Wikisource's own transcription layer is CC BY-SA, which carries share-alike obligations. And the Open Hymnal Project has freely redistributable hymnal PDFs, MIDI and editable sources, but its current edition is from 2014 and its certificate does not match its hostname, so some browsers will refuse it. The content is still good. The site is not maintained.

Modern worship: one source is far more generous than the rest

Life.Church Open is the most generous legitimate free source I found anywhere, and it is not close. Over 35,000 resources. On a worship EP that means MP3 and WAV masters, complete stem sets covering lead vocals, backing vocals, drums, bass, keys, acoustic and electric guitars, loops, pads, synth, click and count, plus chord charts in letter and number formats, ProPresenter bundles, lyric videos and motion graphics. Free, with an account in practice.

Read their terms rather than assuming, because this is not Creative Commons. It is a non-commercial church-use licence they wrote themselves. For their original music it permits public performance, reproduction and distribution internally within your church, derivative works (you may rearrange, which is unusually generous), and streaming from your own website. It does not permit selling, distributing for profit, or exercising any of it "in any manner that is intended for or directed toward commercial advantage or monetary compensation." Their sermon material is far more restricted than their music, so do not read across.

Sovereign Grace Music publishes actual written permissions, which almost nobody does. Sheet music from their site may be freely printed and copied for individual and family worship, small groups, churches under fifty attendees, and churches under a hundred in countries where CCLI is not available. Their recordings may be posted to YouTube with full attribution and the line "All rights reserved. Used by permission." Live-streaming needs a CCLI Streaming Plus licence, and, note this, because it cuts against CCLI's own position that service recordings may stay online indefinitely, they ask that archived video containing their songs is not left up. They almost never permit lyric changes, which they say protects the integrity of the songwriter's work.

Then the part of the picture that surprised me. As at September 2026 I could find no official free recording downloads from Hillsong, Bethel, Elevation or Passion. What is free from them is paper: chord charts and lyrics, largely routed through Worship Together and PraiseCharts, while the recordings are commercial products and the multitracks are sold through MultiTracks.com and Loop Community. That is a normal way to run a music business, and free promotions come and go, so this may well read differently in a year. I mention it only because a reader arriving from a listicle has usually been told the opposite, and will otherwise spend an evening looking for a free download that is not there.

PraiseCharts does have a genuine free tier of charts and lead sheets, and Worship Together gives free lyrics and ChordPro with a free account. Paper, both of them. MultiTracks.com goes further, with a rotating free play of the week, a free multitrack of the month, and free clicks, guides and pads.

Two things that closed, which every list still recommends

NoiseTrade is dead. It went offline in 2023 and the domain now redirects elsewhere. GodlyChristianMusic is dead too, around four thousand artist-permitted MP3s, retired, with a notice on the site.

Those two mattered more than their size suggests, because they were the only platforms built specifically on artist-granted free downloads. Both are gone and nothing replaced them. That vacuum is the honest explanation for why searching "free gospel download" returns what it returns: the legitimate supply shrank, the demand did not, and unlicensed aggregators filled the gap.

The stock-music substitution, which almost nobody flags

Plenty of listicles on this subject recommend Pixabay, Audionautix, Uppbeat or the Free Music Archive as sources of free worship music. They are not sources of worship music at all, and I would rather tell you now than let you find out after an hour of browsing.

They are instrumental production-music libraries, where "worship" and "gospel" are mood tags describing the feel of a cue. On Pixabay's worship tag the uploader names give it away, the titles are things like "Worship Instrumental", and the genre tags include lofi. Pixabay also carries a large amount of AI-generated music. Its terms require uploaders to tick an "AI-generated" box, and it runs AI music as its own searchable category, though the licence summary a user actually reads says nothing about it. And the licence is Pixabay's own proprietary Content License, not Creative Commons, whatever the page around it implies. (Material published there before January 2019 was CC0; current uploads are not.)

Audionautix is clearer about what it is. Its own strapline is "Free Production Music." It is all composed by one man, Jason Shaw, under a clean CC BY 4.0 licence, no sign-up, credit required. "Gospel" is a listed genre and it means the mood. The Free Music Archive's gospel page returns 177 tracks, real songs mostly, but all from small independent uploaders with no widely known gospel artist among them; licences vary per track and must be checked individually. Uppbeat is freemium stock, three free downloads for use on your own channels, account required. ccMixter is live, but it is a remix and stems community and I found no gospel presence worth sending you to.

All of these are genuinely useful if what you need is background music for a church video or a podcast bed. None of them is what somebody means when they say they want free worship music.

Modern independent music: Bandcamp, and what it costs you

Bandcamp still allows an artist to set a price of zero, and when you enter nothing you get the same full-quality download a paying listener gets. It is completely legal, because the artist decided it. What most people do not realise is that a zero price is usually email-gated by design. Bandcamp's own mechanism captures an address, and that address is the artist's payment. That is a fair trade and worth understanding rather than resenting.

Browse the gospel, worship, christian and praise tags in a normal browser; there is no site-wide free filter, so you check price by release. Expect independent artists, spirituals and small-church projects. Established gospel artists on major labels are not giving albums away there.

SoundCloud still lets artists enable a real file download per track, on the web player, signed in. If there is no button, either the uploader turned it off or the track has hit its download cap, since free accounts get a hundred downloads per track. Do not use third-party SoundCloud downloader tools; they strip the artist's choice, which is the whole point of the button existing.

Nigerian and African gospel: the question needs reframing

I looked hard for this, because it is what a great many people searching these terms actually want, and I would rather give you a straight answer than a hopeful one.

There is no legitimate source of free MP3 downloads of commercial Nigerian gospel. Not because nobody has built one, but because no such licence exists. Sinach, Nathaniel Bassey, Dunsin Oyekan and Tope Alabi do not give their recordings away, and I could find no official free-download channel for any of them.

What does exist, and is genuinely free and genuinely licensed, is streaming. Audiomack and Boomplay are ad-supported, licensed, deep in African and Nigerian catalogue, and carry official artist accounts. Nathaniel Bassey alone has over 866,000 followers on Audiomack. Their "download" buttons mean offline playback inside the app. Audiomack say so themselves: "Due to copyright restrictions, downloads to your device's internal memory or sharing with other devices isn't possible."

So for this catalogue, free and legal means free to stream, not free to keep. Anywhere offering these artists' albums as free MP3s is doing it without permission and paying them nothing. Nigerian gospel has spent a century being under-recorded and under-documented, and I went through some of that history in the evolution of worship music. The artists who finally have the infrastructure to be paid properly are the last people who should be subsidising a download portal's advertising revenue.

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How can you tell a legitimate free source from an unlicensed one?

Look for a rights statement. Every legitimate free source verified for this article has one and says it plainly, and not one unlicensed site did. After that, check whether the party who granted permission is named, whether the free offer makes commercial sense, and what is wrapped around the download button.

I expected to find an official consumer checklist for this. There isn't one.

The now-archived Get It Right From A Genuine Site campaign, from the BPI and the Motion Picture Association, still has its page on the law up, but it publishes no such list. FACT publishes risk warnings and no checklist. The nearest thing to a directory is IFPI's Pro-Music list of licensed services by country, which IFPI does not guarantee is complete.

There is also a police-verified list of infringing sites, the Infringing Website List, compiled by the Police Intellectual Property Crime Unit with IAB UK under Operation Creative, and members of the public cannot see it. It exists to defund those sites through advertising contracts, and City of London Police reported in January 2023 that it had blocked around £6m of UK advertising revenue from them. Useful work. No help at all to you at the moment you are looking at a download button.

So here is a checklist you can apply in under a minute, built from what the legitimate sources above actually do.

1. Is there a rights statement anywhere? Every legitimate free source I verified has one and says it plainly. Hymnal.net: "either posted with permission or belong to the public domain." HymnServe: "provided it is for FREE distribution... NO ALTERATIONS... this COPYRIGHT notice is included." The Free Church of Scotland: "may be reproduced in any form without copyright concerns." Silence on rights is the single strongest signal there is. Not one unlicensed site I came across had a rights statement.

2. Is the party who granted permission named? A label, a publisher, a distributor, or the artist. Sovereign Grace names Integrity Music and CCLI. PraiseCharts names its sources. A site offering a commercial release for free without saying who authorised it has not been authorised.

3. Does the free offer make commercial sense? A church giving away its own songs to spread them makes sense. A composer giving away production music to build a reputation makes sense. An artist trading a download for your email address makes sense. An anonymous site giving away a major-label gospel album makes no sense at all, because nobody in that transaction is paid.

4. What is wrapped around the download? Pop-unders, interstitials, decoy "Download" buttons, forced redirects. I downloaded from Hymnal.net, Audionautix and Life.Church with no interstitial whatsoever. Legitimate sources link to the file.

5. Can you find out who runs it? Every legitimate source I checked names a person or a body: Dick Adams, Jason Shaw, Elaine Johnson, the Free Church of Scotland's Central Office. Hymnal.net actively invites takedown requests. An operator who cannot be contacted cannot be held responsible.

6. Read the page title. "Mp3 Download", "Free Zip", "Full Album", the current year, and the site's own domain injected into the track title or the file's metadata. Legitimate sources name the work. Unlicensed ones name the transaction.

7. Does it credit the audio it is hosting? No performer, no writer, no album, no label means it did not come from the rights holder.

8. Looking professional proves nothing. FACT put this better than I can: unlicensed services "are designed to look professional and very similar to legitimate sites." Design quality is not evidence. Rights statements are.

9. Being hosted somewhere reputable is not a licence. This one catches careful people. The Internet Archive's scanned hymnals, and recordings from 1925 and earlier, are a genuine treasure. It also holds user-uploaded collections of contemporary worship albums with no rights statement, no licence and no label involvement, filed under community audio. The Archive is a host. Hosting is not clearance.

10. And the thing most people do not know. The Get It Right campaign states it plainly: "accessing content from these sites is also illegal. Even if you don't download the content, streaming pirated content from these sites can also amount to copyright infringement." That is an industry campaign's statement of the position rather than a settled judicial one, and the temporary-copies exception in section 28A of the Act bears on a mere viewer. But do not comfort yourself that a listener is obviously a neutral party. Nobody has promised you that.

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What may your church actually do with it?

Less than most churches assume, because there is no religious-service exception in UK copyright law. What covers a Sunday morning is a licensing policy operated by CCLI on behalf of PRS and PPL, not a right in the Act, and it stops at the door of anything that is not a service.

Everything here is the UK position. If you are reading from elsewhere, the shape is similar and the details are not.

The thing nobody expects

There is no religious-service exception in UK copyright law. The statutory exceptions cover research and private study, text and data mining, criticism and review, teaching, helping disabled people, time-shifting and parody. Worship is not among them.

The United States does have one. 17 U.S.C. § 110(3) exempts 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." Note where "of a religious nature" sits: it qualifies only the dramatico-musical works, so an ordinary song of any kind is inside that exemption. We do not have that. And since most guidance a British reader finds online is American and quietly rests on that section, this is worth knowing before you rely on something you read.

What we have instead comes from the collecting societies rather than from Parliament. CCLI, who distribute the PRS and PPL church licences in the UK, state it like this: "An exemption exists for music played during 'Acts of Worship' (ie regular worship services). So if music is not played in any other church activities or by third parties using church premises, you do not need these licences."

I have quoted that rather than paraphrased it, because the wording is doing work. It is CCLI's statement of the position, not PRS's own. I could not find PRS or PPL setting it out in those terms on their own current pages, and it operates as a licensing policy rather than as a right you could assert in court. Which means it can be described differently in different places, and it can change.

Where "act of worship" ends is not defined anywhere I could find. CCLI give two useful edges: Sunday school held inside a Sunday service counts as part of the act of worship, and home groups and private functions are private occasions needing no licence at all. Between those, a carol service, a worship night, a concert with congregational singing, nobody has written down which side of the line they fall. If your situation is near that boundary, ask rather than assume.

Does a church need a licence to play music in the UK?

Outside acts of worship, yes, and usually two of them, because the song and the recording are separate rights. PRS licenses the song, PPL licenses the recording, and CCLI covers what you do with lyrics and sheet music. Which ones you need depends on what you are doing, not on who you are.

Two things in that table are worth pulling out, because they are the ones churches get wrong.

The first is the difference between the two streaming licences. If your musicians play it live, the base Streaming Licence covers you. The moment you play a commercial recording or a multitrack on a stream, you need Streaming Plus. CCLI's own wording on the base licence is songs "performed live by your church musicians"; Streaming Plus extends to "master recordings (artist tracks, backing tracks, and multitracks) from any authorised source." A great many churches are on the wrong one without knowing it.

The second is that a CCLI streaming licence may not be the whole answer, and this depends on where you stream. CCLI say on their own page that their licences "do not cover music use on your website/social media pages" and that "a Digital Music Licence for Worship may be required directly from PRS for Music." Church guidance from the Evangelical Alliance and the Diocese of Chelmsford has long drawn the same line: for the big platforms the CCLI Streaming Licence has been treated as sufficient, while streaming from your own website or over Zoom needs a PRS online licence in addition, to cover the performing right. Both of those predate PRS's October 2025 rename, but CCLI's live page confirms the two-licence structure still stands. If you self-host your stream, check this before you assume one licence covers you.

Two smaller ones. Weddings and funerals are separately waived by both PRS and PPL, so music can be played freely, provided the service is not recorded or streamed. If it is, permission is needed. And PPL requires an annual report of music use where PRS currently does not.

Can a church use a worship song in a video?

Usually not on a church licence. A recording of a service is covered by the streaming licences, but a produced video is a different thing, and it needs a synchronisation licence from the publisher for the song and a master use licence from the label for the recording, negotiated directly with each.

If you take one thing from this section, take this: there is a line between a service and a production, and your licences stop at it.

A recording of your service, streamed or uploaded, is covered. That is what the streaming licences are for, with Streaming Plus if you play master recordings during it. A produced video is not a service. The Christmas invitation reel cut to an Elevation track, the youth-weekend highlights video over a Hillsong song, the promo clip with a Chris Tomlin chorus underneath: no church licence reaches any of them.

CCLI put it carefully, and the hedge is theirs: to include video content in your streaming activity, you "would usually need to obtain permission from the copyright owner(s)." They name one exception, SongSelect Lyric Videos, which Streaming Plus holders may currently show during a live stream. PRS's Digital Music Licence for Worship, introduced in October 2025, covers the streaming of worship services, and the version of its commercial terms I read excluded synchronisation rights, public performance rights, sound recording rights, music in marketing or corporate videos, downloads, physical distribution on CD or USB, podcasts, and any service where revenue is derived from the music use. The PDF I read those from has since moved, so treat that list as indicative and check the current terms with PRS.

That negotiation is not a form you fill in, and for a small church it is usually a no.

This is precisely where the production-music libraries stop being a disappointment and start being the right tool. Audionautix under its CC BY licence, or Pixabay under its own. You wanted worship music and you found library cues. For a video, library cues are what you actually needed.

Note also the revenue exclusion, which has a sharp edge. A monetised YouTube channel, or a stream on a page carrying online giving, may fall outside these licences. How that applies to donations rather than advertising is not something either body states clearly, and I would not guess at it. Ask CCLI directly.

Can a church use Creative Commons music?

Yes, and it is one of the safest options available, but two of the four licence conditions cause real problems in a church and they are not the ones people expect. NonCommercial attaches to the use rather than the user, and NoDerivatives forbids the rearranging every worship band does.

NonCommercial (NC) attaches to the use, not the user. Being a charity does not automatically make a use non-commercial. The licence defines it as "not primarily intended for or directed towards commercial advantage or monetary compensation," and "primarily" does a great deal of undefined work.

Creative Commons know this is unsettled. They commissioned a study on it in 2009 because the term was contested. Its most useful finding for churches sits in the scenarios they tested. Asked to rate uses on a hundred-point commercial scale, creators put online advertising at a mean of 84.6. The scenario closest to a church, a not-for-profit using the work on its site with advertising covering the hosting costs, came out at a mean of 59.2 among creators and 71.7 among users. Barely above the midpoint for the people who made the work, twelve points higher for the people using it. And 74% of creators and 77% of users believed others shared their definition. Two groups reading the same clause differently, both assuming agreement. That is the condition in which disputes happen.

Practically: singing an NC-licensed song in a service and projecting the words is comfortably fine. Putting it on a monetised channel is the clearest NC breach a church can commit, and it happens by default the moment monetisation is switched on. Selling recordings or charging admission is commercial even where you only recover costs.

NoDerivatives (ND) is the one nobody sees coming, and for a worship band it bites harder than NC. Transposing a song, re-arranging it, dropping a verse, trimming it to fit a video: all arguably derivative works, all forbidden outright by ND. Churches worry about NC and walk straight into ND.

If your use is anywhere near a revenue line, do not rely on NC. Ask the rights holder in writing. No Creative Commons licence prevents you asking, and an email costs nothing. Or choose CC BY or CC0 material, where the question does not arise.

Whatever you do, work at it with all your heart, as working for the Lord, not for human masters.

Colossians 3:23, NIVUK

I have used that verse myself to wave away a corner I had cut, on the grounds that it was for church. It says the opposite. Work done for God is held to a higher standard of care than work done for a client, not a lower one, and the paperwork is part of the work.

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Why is my own catalogue free?

Because I am convinced a great many people need to hear good Christian music, and that God gets the glory when they do. Almost everything I have recorded is on this site as a free download: twenty-six tracks across sixteen releases, no email, no account, no payment.

A few older records in the full catalogue, Uncensored Worship among them, are not offered as downloads. Everything on the downloads page is yours.

These songs were written across more than two decades. They come out of tens and hundreds of hours of scripture study, a great many scribbles, tonnes of discarded lines, fact-checking, prayer, and tens of thousands of pounds in production costs. I am not pretending they cost nothing. They cost a great deal, and most of it was mine.

Freely you have received; freely give.

Matthew 10:8, NIVUK

Freely was I given. Freely I give, unreserved.

All I ask of every download is three things. Listen to it. Pray with it. Pass it on to somebody else. That is the only price, and it is not for me.

What "free" means here, in the terms this article has been using

Since I have spent several thousand words insisting that people state their permissions plainly, it would be poor form not to state mine, including the part that is more complicated than I would like.

I own the recordings outright. I paid for them, nobody else has a claim on them, and the master side is entirely mine to give away. That is the part of the free download that is unambiguous.

The songs themselves are a different matter, and this is the honest bit. I am a member of PRS and MCPS, which means the collecting societies administer two things on my behalf: the performing right in the compositions, and the mechanical and synchronisation rights. So on the song side I am not a free agent, even though I wrote every word of them.

Which is a small illustration of this article's own argument turning round and biting the author. I have spent this whole page telling you that the song and the recording are two different works with two different owners. Here they are, both mine, and still not mine in the same way.

In practice this changes very little, because the everyday uses are covered. The acts-of-worship position handles church services, and I am not going to pursue anybody for putting a track on their phone. But it decides which list a thing goes in, and I would rather be accurate than generous-sounding.

You may, with no permission needed and no fee:

• Download any track on the downloads page and keep it
• Listen to it anywhere, as often as you like
• Copy it to your own devices
• Give a copy to somebody else, which is the point of the whole exercise
• Play the recording in a church service, and at a small group, youth group or home group
• Sing the songs in a service, and project the words

Please ask first, and the answer is very likely yes:

• Using a track in a video, a church video, a testimony film, a montage, anything at all. I can grant you the recording without hesitating, but synchronising the song to picture is a right MCPS administers, so let me clear it properly rather than leave you exposed. This is the one people assume is fine and it is the one to ask about
• Any commercial use, selling a recording, or using a track in something you charge for
• Anything monetised, including a monetised YouTube channel
• Broadcast, or use in a film or advertisement
• Substantially rewriting the lyrics
• Reproducing a track on a physical release, a CD, a USB stick, a compilation

Ask through the booking page and say what you want to do. I would rather have a short email than have somebody assume in either direction. Nothing on that second list is a trap; it is a phone call I have to make on your behalf, and I am happy to make it.

That list took twenty minutes to write, and about a fortnight of working out what I could honestly promise. Most artists never publish one, and I understand why: it is unglamorous, and getting it wrong in public is worse than saying nothing. But its absence is a large part of why people end up on unlicensed sites. Not because they set out to take something, but because nobody told them what they were allowed to have.

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Where to go next

• Everything I have recorded, free, MP3, with artwork and metadata embedded.
• The evolution of Christian worship music, the same story from AD 112.
• The difference between gospel and worship music, why the two words are not rivals.
• The top 10 Nigerian gospel songs, ranked on chart data rather than taste, with every figure attributed.

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This article is general information about copyright and licensing, not legal advice. Licence terms change and the collecting societies revise their products. CCLI, PRS for Music and PPL are the authorities on their own licences, and where this page and their current terms disagree, they are right and I am out of date. Checked September 2026.

Scripture quotations marked NIVUK taken from the Holy Bible, New International Version Anglicised, Copyright © 1979, 1984, 2011 Biblica. Used by permission of Hodder & Stoughton Publishers, an Hachette UK company. All rights reserved. 'NIV' is a registered trademark of Biblica. UK trademark number 1448790.

Sources

Legislation and official guidance

• Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, s.1 (categories of work), s.12 (literary and musical works), s.13A (sound recordings), s.15 (typographical arrangement)
• Open Music Archive on UK recordings published in 1962 or earlier
• How long copyright lasts, Intellectual Property Office and Exceptions to copyright
• 17 U.S.C. § 110 (US religious service exemption) and § 1401 (pre-1972 sound recordings)
• US Copyright Office Circular 56A on sound recordings and compositions as separate works, and Circular 15a on duration
• Duke Center for the Study of the Public Domain, Public Domain Day 2026

Licensing bodies

• CCLI UK on the Church Copyright Licence, streaming licences, playing-music licences and weddings and funerals
• PRS for Music Digital Music Licence for Worship, commercial terms
• PPL on playing music in a workplace or venue
• Get It Right From A Genuine Site, the law and what it means, FACT on illegal streaming, IFPI Pro-Music and IAB UK on the Infringing Website List
• Church guidance on the two-licence structure for streaming: the Evangelical Alliance and the Diocese of Chelmsford

Licences and definitions

• Creative Commons FAQ, the licences, CC0 and CC BY-NC 4.0 legal code
• Defining Noncommercial, Creative Commons, 2009
• PremiumBeat on royalty-free versus copyright-free
• Pixabay terms of service and licence summary

The sources themselves

• Hymnal.net · Hymnary.org · The Cyber Hymnal, with the Canterbury Dictionary of Hymnology on its history · IMSLP and IMSLP: Copyright Made Simple · Wikisource hymn portal · Open Hymnal Project
• Free Church of Scotland praise resources · ThePsalmsSung.org · HymnServe
• Life.Church Open · Sovereign Grace Music permissions · PraiseCharts free sheet music · Worship Together · MultiTracks.com free
• Free Music Archive gospel · Audionautix · Pixabay worship tag · Bandcamp