There is a gap in funeral music licensing that catches out careful people, and it has widened quietly as webcasting and keepsake recordings became ordinary.
What the waiver actually covers
Playing a commercial recording at a funeral service is covered without a licence of your own. That is longstanding, it is why nobody thinks about it, and it is genuinely generous — the family names the track, you play it, that is the end of it.
The waiver covers the room. It does not follow the music out of the room.
Where it stops
Two things happen at a lot of funerals now that the waiver was not written for.
The service is webcast, so relatives abroad can attend. That is a communication to the public, and it is a different right from playing a record to the people in front of you.
The family is given a recording — a DVD, a link, a file — with the music in it. That is a reproduction, and it is a third thing again.
Neither is covered by the waiver. Both need licensing, and the licensing is not difficult so much as unobvious: the point is that a director who has done nothing wrong for twenty years can start doing something wrong the week they add webcasting, without anything telling them.
Who carries it
In practice, whoever made the recording. If your crematorium's AV supplier handles the webcast, ask them what licence it runs under and get the answer in writing — not because you expect a problem, but because "the crematorium does it" is not an answer you would want to give a rights holder.
If you produce a tribute video in-house from the family's photographs and set it to a commercial track, that is squarely yours.
The way round it, and its limits
An original piece of music has no third-party master or publishing rights to clear, so a recording containing it can be shared and kept without any of the above. That is true of a composer writing something for the family, and it is true of a song generated on a licensed engine.
It is worth being precise about what that solves and what it does not. It removes the third-party rights question. It does not remove the need to know who owns the resulting work, what the family may do with it, and what happens if they want it taken down. Those are questions to ask of any supplier — including us — and the right answer is a written one.
What we would do
Ask your AV supplier and your tribute supplier the same three questions, and keep the replies:
- Under what licence is a webcast of a service containing commercial music covered?
- If the family is given a copy, what covers that?
- If the music is original, who holds the rights in it, and what exactly does the family get?
A supplier who cannot answer the third one has not thought about it.
Source: PRS for Music — digital music licensing and CCLI's guidance on weddings and funerals. This is a summary written by a supplier, not legal advice; if it matters to your business, get it checked.