Our Worship Is Turning Praise into Secular Profit
“With corporate consolidation in worship music, more entities are invested in the songs sung on Sunday mornings. How will their financial incentives shape the church?” - CToday
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A portion of the rights and royalties for Mooring’s song, which would have once been continuously paid out to the song’s creators and label, were sold at auction in 2020 as part of a $900,000 package to a private investor. The bundle of songs had made $156,393 the year before, more than three-quarters from the use of “Lion and the Lamb.” The investor who made the winning bid was quoted an industry-projected return of nearly 15 percent.
The words and melodies that stir hearts to worship each Sunday are also intellectual property (IP) on the market, caught up in a recent surge of acquisitions across the music industry. The investment activity has become a “feeding frenzy,” according to industry executive Hartwig Masuch, with worship hits a small part of the billions invested in IP and royalty streams.
Views expressed are always my own and not my employer's, my church's, my family's, my neighbors', or my pets'. The house plants have authorized me to speak for them, however, and they always agree with me.
....has been an issue for as long as printers have been protected by copyrights, really. Worth noting is that there are typically three copyrights on each hymn; the lyrics, the music, and the arrangement. Lots of hands in that bowl of popcorn.
So I'm not that worked up about the fact that there are a limited number of online vendors for the newer songs. It's been the same way, really, for half a millenium.
Aspiring to be a stick in the mud.
The point of the article is that a lot of consolidation has been happening, turning worship music publishing into more and more of a big business… and what are the results of that going to be if the trend continues?
Views expressed are always my own and not my employer's, my church's, my family's, my neighbors', or my pets'. The house plants have authorized me to speak for them, however, and they always agree with me.
With self-publishing in both books and the interwebs, the barrier to entry is low, and there are hundreds of colleges and universities with good schools of music turning out more and more people who can do this.
For me, the thing that is most worrisome is the tendency to do things that are really bad musically--using instruments more or less as a metronome, failing to put countermelodies and harmonies into a tune, confusing loudness ("all the way to 11!") with emotion, and confusing adding more instrumentalists and vocalists with musicality. People who eschew these formulaic ways of putting together a song (on both sides of the "worship wars" divide, mind you) are going to quickly get a lot of customers, IMO.
Aspiring to be a stick in the mud.
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