CCLI Reporting

Christian Copyright Licensing International (CCLI) provides a licensing scheme for churches and other entities in many countries worldwide. Under the terms of this license, a church has permission to use the lyrics of a song in digital form, and on printed word sheets, and also has the limited right to record congregational singing of such songs. But CCLI does not cover every song, although it covers the vast majority of songs. And to comply with the terms of a license, a church must report usage of those songs to CCLI on a regular basis, otherwise it is not covered by the license.

What follows is a summary of the steps needed to effectively use a CCLI license, together with SlideGen.

1. Purchase a CCLI License

You, or the entity you represent (i.e. your church), need to first purchase a license from CCLI. There are various licenses available, depending on who you are and what country you are located in. Please refer to the CCLI website in your area for further information and to make a purchase.

2. Enter your CCLI License details into SlideGen

When you first install SlideGen you have the opportunity to enter your CCLI license details. You can change this at any time after installation by going to Setup Options within the main window.

3. Enter the CCLI Song Number for each song

When you add a new song to the Song Catalogue, if that song is under copyright and covered by CCLI, make sure that you mark it as being covered by CCLI and enter its CCLI Song Number. See the sample dialog below. You can find out the CCLI Song Number by going to CCLI's website in your country and searching their song catalogue. For more information, see the help on Creating a New Song.

4. Specify Correct Usage when Saving a Presentation

When you create and save a presentation, you need to specify how the songs in that presentation are being used - i.e. for "Projection", "Print", and/or "Record" purposes. This information will be used in the next step when you create the Copyright Report.

5. Generate a Copyright Report

CCLI (at least in the Asia Pacific region) collate their copyright usage data on a 6-monthly basis, at the end of March and September. So at regular intervals, at least as often as this, you need to report all of the usage data that has been collated within SlideGen since the last time you reported. You do this by generating a Copyright Report.

You will need to refer to your CCLI license terms and conditions, and the CCLI online reporting website for details about how to calculate the reporting numbers that CCLI requires. At issue is - do you report a song everytime it is used, or only the first time, etc..?

At the time of writing, in the Asia Pacific Region, CCLI's online report website indicates the following:

"Print" - "Report one (1) copy activity each time the words/lyrics of a song is reproduced in bulletin, song sheet, songbook, transparency, slide or similar forms"
"Digital" (Project) - "Report one (1) copy activity each time the words/lyrics of a song is stored into or retrieved from computer software;"
"Record" - "Report one (1) copy activity each time a song is recorded."

Here at SlideGen, we interpret the above to match the following settings when generating a copyright report (note the order of the first two categories is reveresed):

Projection (Digital) - "Every time plus first time" - this records every time a song is used in a presentation (i.e. "retrieved from computer software") and adds an additional count for the first time it is used (which effectively covers the initial "stored into" action)
Print - "Every time" - this records one copy activity "each time" the words are reproduced in print form
Recording - "Every time" - this records one copy activity "each time" a song is recorded

SlideGen provides a special CCLI format of the standard Copyright Report, which matches CCLI's categories above of Print / Digital / Record, in that order, to make it easy when reporting to CCLI. This report layout should already be selected for you, but if not, you can change it in Modify Report Layouts.

Once generated, the CCLI Copyright Report should look something like this:

6. Report Your Usage to CCLI

The above report should be printed and retained by your church etc as an official record of copyright usage data collated. By clicking on the Print button you can send it to your printer, or you can select the "Print to File" option and save it as a PDF document, or another format (such as a MS Excel File).

At the time of writing, CCLI does not support or allow a "file upload" facility for copyright reporting. So you will need to enter your copyright usage one song at a time, by searching for that song within their Online Reporting website, and then entering the usage data for that song. For easy searching, we recommend that you enter the CCLI Song Number in the search field, not the Song Title.

To make it easier for you, you may wish to save the above report as a PDF document or Excel file, so that you can then easily copy-and-paste the CCLI Song Number from the report. Please refer to the bottom of our Copyright Report page for details on saving as an Excel file.

If, at some future time, CCLI add support for uploading copyright usage data in file format, a Copyright File Export feature will be added to SlideGen.