If you have written a worship song that your church is using in its worship services and the song is clearly resonating with your congregation, we want to give you the opportunity to share your song with worship leaders and teams in CCLI churches across North America. As the Open Mic name implies, we are open to submissions of worship songs from all musical styles, genres, denominations and regions. There will be, however, a screening/audition process for appropriateness, relevance and quality.

• CCLI’s Open Mic is a video venue. Audio-only files cannot be considered.
• Please carefully consider the setting for your video. Live worship service, casual, concept video…all are possibilities, but we give a STRONG preference to videos from a live worship set. And whatever setting you choose, please remember that thousands of worship leaders and church musicians around the world may potentially be viewing your video. Therefore, we encourage you to make the musical performance and the video recording itself the best it can be.
• Selection of song videos for Open Mic streaming performances will be based on the quality of the song, musical performance and video recording, at the sole discretion and determination of CCLI. The song must be Biblically sound and appropriate/singable for a worshipping congregation.
• CCLI TV accepts a wide range of video file formats such as .WMV, .AVI, .MOV, and .MPG transferred from most digital cameras, camcorders, and cell phones. We've found that files converted from .wmv to one of the other formats our webpage accepts generally have a lower playback quality than other file formats. If you have your source video in a format other than a .wmv file, you may want to encode directly to MPEG4 (DivX, Xvid, SVQ3) at 640x480 resolution, with 64k Mono MP3 Audio. If you have a source .wmv in high bitrate and larger resolution you may want to convert to MPEG4 at full resolution and then resize to 540x405 (for 4:3) using a high quality resizing algorithm - this can help reduce the number of artifacts you end up with.

We will notify you by email, once we have approved your song for Open Mic streaming. Before it goes live, however, we need to take care of all the paperwork/permissions. At that point, you can download the Submission Form (PDF) below, fill it out and fax or mail it back to us.

Here are the things we need to cover…

• Songwriters must be affiliated with a church that holds a valid Church Copyright License. Please include the church name and the church’s CCLI license number on the Open Mic Song Submission form.
• Songwriters must be registered with CCLI. (This will allow churches to legally use your song under their Church Copyright License.) Please include your Administrator ID number on your Open Mic Song Submission form. If you are not yet registered with CCLI as a songwriter, please call 1-800-234-2446 and press ‘5’ for the copyright department, and we’ll help you register.
• Open Mic is intended primarily for unpublished songs. If the song you wish to submit is already under a publishing contract, you must have retained the ownership right to record/distribute/stream the song via a streaming web venue such as Open Mic.
• You must affirm that you have obtained proper talent releases from all “principal persons” involved with the video (singers, musicians, etc.). For general audience scenes, permissions are not necessary.
• You must include a website and/or email address, should worship leaders/teams wish to contact you regarding your song.

CCLI commits that your song and video will be used only for Open Mic consideration. You will retain ownership of the song and recording.