Flying an airplane and performing brain surgery (legally!) require one. So does distributing music. What is it? A license!

Licenses allow you to legally distribute, cover, and adapt music you don’t own or control. Knowing which licenses exist and how to obtain them saves headaches, aggravation, and most importantly — exorbitant legal fees incurred from copyright infringement.

The Golden Rule of Licensing: if you don’t own or control it, you likely need a license to use it. There are a few exceptions (such as public domain compositions), though the golden rule is a common sense guideline that can help determine when licenses are needed.

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There is a wealth of public domain Christmas music available, so if you want to avoid the hassle of tracking and paying royalties, you shouldn’t have any problems. I start by looking at the Public Domain website’s list of Christmas songs. Many Christmas hymns and spirituals are public domain, along with old traditional carols. A lot of times these melodies were written years before the lyrics were added and the tune became associated with Christmas (ie. Greensleeves).

Hymns and spirituals are great for instrumental albums, but won’t always work for vocalists. After all, many of the vocal standards recorded by Harry Connick, Jr. or Nat King Cole are secular pieces written by tin pan alley era composers or later. If you’re interested in recording songs that are not in the public domain, you will have to pay royalties. The easiest way to do this is by using Limelight, an online service that collects royalties and administers them to the copyright holders for you. For further reading, see my article on releasing cover songs. Read the rest of this entry »