Hey guys! Before you get started, we have a Holiday Marketing Guide for Musicians you can swipe for help customizing and organizing your Holiday Marketing Campaign. CLICK HERE to get it.
In the age of virtual shows and live streaming, a lot of us musicians have more than likely become increasingly aware of the little issue of copyright, licensing, and having to pay fees to cover songs. Platforms like YouTube and Facebook will even go as far as striking your channel, demonetizing your videos, removing audio, or even putting you in some sort of jail for a time if you commit a copyright offense. Writing, releasing, and performing your own music is the only, truly, safe way to share music with your fans without having to worry about copyright infringement issues. Now that Holiday Season is starting up again, it’s time to break out the old trusty Christmas Songs that everyone knows and loves. However, there’s still that little copyright issue to contend with. Not to fear! There are quite a few Christmas songs in the public domain that you can cover over and over again without having to worry about copyright infringement. Here they are…
Angels We Have Heard on High
Auld Lang Syne
Away In a Manger
Deck the Halls
The First Noel
Go Tell It on the Mountain
Hark, the Herald Angels Sing
I Heard the Bells on Christmas Day
Jingle Bells
Joy to the World
O Christmas Tree
O Come All Ye Faithful
O Come, O Come, Emanuel
O Holy Night
O Little Town of Bethlehem
Silent Night
The Twelve Days of Christmas
We Three Kings
We Wish You A Merry Christmas
What Child Is This?
Related: 7 Holiday Marketing Tips for Musicians When You Don’t Have Christmas Music to Sell
The best part about covering Christmas songs is that you can make them your own by adding your own personal style to them. You can also combine them with other songs and create a nice medley. Holidays are a time of good cheer and celebration. Just because a lot of Christmas songs are copyrighted, it doesn’t mean you can’t sing any at all. In fact, this article gave you a strong list of 20 you can play around with all of which are in the public domain, so you can rest assured that you won’t be penalized for covering these. Have fun!
Don’t forget to swipe our free Holiday Marketing Calendar for Musicians before you go! It provides you with the most popular holidays you can build off of to create your customized marketing plan for the season along with some marketing ideas you can steal. CLICK HERE to get it.
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Thanks for sharing this list, Anitra! Looks like there’s a lot of great classics that are available to the public.
Yes! There’s a lot more than I originally thought. It’s a lot of fun to take these and make them your own too! 🙂
It looks good but unfortunately FB blocked a video I was streaming today because apparently Hark The Herald Angels Sing is owned by UMG which is nonsense. This was a carol concert and I carefully put in only carols from the above list – carols performed by a local choir. So not happy and no way of contacting fb to sort this out – Happy Christmas FB!
David, that is wild. Every list I’ve seen has Hark The Herald Angels Sing as a public domain song. That’s crazy FB took it down! FB does some weird stuff. I’m so sorry that happened. What’s annoying is you try to follow the rules and still you get stuff like this. I know you must have worked really hard to put your project together. Have you put it on YouTube?
Thank you Anitra, really appreciate your reply. I still am at a loss to understand how a carol published in 1739 is UMG copyright – actually its not but somehow the FB algorithm got it wrong. I haven’t published to youtube mainly because the audience have been used to FB since March – but I will have a think. Hope you have a lovely Christmas!
I would love to know if this issue ever got straightened out.
HI Eli, no it never got sorted out because there is no real human behind all this – its just AI – and to cap it all my FB account was hacked earlier this year and despite going through a whole heap of processes to prove who I was and to also prove that the posts that were ‘against FB terms and conditions’ were posted by a bot not by me, FB decided to permanently suspend me from FB. So I have given up FB live!!
Thank you for this, Anitra. This is incredibly useful information. I’m excited to have these options.
The more I read from you, the more I realize just how useful TheCraftyMusician site is. And the more grateful I am for your shared insight.
Thank you Eli! I appreciate you being a part of the community and it warms my heart to know that you’re finding this blog helpful!
Thank you for the list, however last year my live carol service was upset by a copyright infringement on facebook live of ‘Hark the Herald Angels Sing’ so presumably no-one told Meta about the copyright!!