Episode 465: George Ross - President of CCLI

<LYRICS>Hymns, Prayers and Invitations</LYRICS> The latest album from Rick Lee James has garnered praise from CCM Magazine, Worship Leader Magazine, UTR Media and more. Written and arranged using hymnals and prayer books for inspiration, this collection of 10 modern hymn-like worship songs will inspire individuals and congregations to draw near to the heart of God. <LYRICS>—Holy name of God.</LYRICS> Highlights include Christ Is Lord, inspired by St. Patrick's Breastplate Prayer, Advent Hymn, and the communion hymn, The Invitation. Worship leaders will be glad to know that all songs on the album are published through Lifeway Worship. Find hymns, prayers, and invitations on Amazon, Spotify, Apple Music, CD Baby, and at Rick Lee James.

Welcome to Voices in My Head, the official podcast of me, Rick Lee James. I'm a recording artist, a singer, a songwriter, an author, a worship leader, and an ordained minister in the Church of the Nazarene. The Voices in My Head podcast is where I discuss music, movies, books, pop culture, theology, and more with friends, colleagues, and sometimes just by myself. Now make sure to let me know what you think of today's episode by leaving me a review on iTunes or by tweeting at me @RickLeeJames on Twitter. And please join my mailing list at RickLeeJames.com where you can receive an email every time a new episode is released. By the way, in case you're interested in a daily dose of kindness and encouragement beyond this podcast, I also run the Twitter account @MrRogersSay where I post daily quotes from Fred Rogers, one of the voices in my head. Well, I guess that's it for the intro, so sit back, relax, and listen to the latest episode of Voices in My Head.

Welcome back to Voices in My Head. As always, I'm your host, Rick Lee James, and I am so glad that you're here with us again for another excellent conversation this week. My guest this week on the podcast is George Ross. As president of Christian Copyright Licensing International, or as you might know it, CCLI, George strives to innovate and improve experiences for CCLI's customers and rights holders and continues to ensure CCLI is a market leader by simplifying the complexities of copyright. He has over 20 years of leadership experience and a strong track record of creating and deploying multilingual solutions that serve a global audience. Prior to his role as president, George served as the company's chief operating officer for 3 years and chief technology officer for 9 years. And during that time, he was focused on building strong teams that deeply integrate into the business by pulling on his own depth of experience as a strategic technical consultant to numerous Fortune 500 companies and elite and leading universities and a good old-fashioned willingness to roll up his sleeves, George is recognized as an expert in web technologies with national speaking credits and publications to his name. So after that incredibly good and rich bio, George Ross, welcome to Voices in My Head.

Well, thank you so much, Rick. I mean, uh, it's always kind of embarrassing to hear about yourself when you've had to write those things. Uh, probably the— for this audience, the more accurate view of me is a long-suffering, I think is the word, no, electric guitar player because, you know, we don't, we never get our day in the sun on Sundays. But I've been as a, just like you guys, a member of a worship team for all through my teen years and most of my adult life on the platform performing. My wife's a singer as well. So it's So there's all that other stuff, but then there's the, uh, that, that part of me I think is probably a little more relevant to today.

Sure. Yeah. Well, I understand, and it's so good to know. And, and by the way, we, we get it, all of us who have played electric guitar in church, where it's never quite loud enough for us and always too loud for everybody else. I don't know how it always works that way, but very good. Well, thanks for, for sharing that with us and, and giving us some of your background, um, both that you're not only just president of CCLI, but that you're a person who's doing ministry and that you're in churches doing it as well. And I want to let my listeners know as we begin today what led to this conversation and a phone call that we had last week. I had a couple of my pastor friends from the, the district here that I serve in Ohio who run a podcast called The Evangelicals, and we had a conversation about CCLI, and it turned into be— on some level, I wanted to try to highlight some good things, but unfortunately, I think it turned into more of a gripe fest in some ways. And then in other ways, I think it turned into us basing some of our misconceptions on things that just were not true. You were gracious enough to reach out in an email to me and say that you had taken time to listen to the podcast, and you'd said, uh, that there were just some things that if you had a chance, you'd love to, to clear up and talk about some things and sent me some other resources to look at. And I learned a lot. And then we talked on the phone last week, and I thought, well, first of all, I need to, before my audience, repent a little bit and say, I think maybe I said some things that were untrue. And anytime that I do that, anytime that we do that as Christians, I think it's important that we, you know, go back on that. So allow me to add my publicly words of apologies for things I got wrong and that we may have talked about in that way that we're accurate. But I'm so grateful that you actually, you pretty much volunteered. I asked you a little bit, you kind of volunteered to say, hey, let's, let's chat together and talk about some of these things. So I'm so grateful for you to be able to come on and have this conversation today. So that's the background to our conversation. Did I get it right? Something, something pretty close to that?

Yeah. Yeah, I'd heard the podcast and always like to just reach out and just have an opportunity to just chat with people. So, um, you know, it's, it's pretty easy to kind of view, um, CCLI as a, as a almost an institution. Um, and, uh, I, I just always want to introduce kind of the heart and people, uh, who we are and what we really believe, uh, whenever given the opportunity. So I appreciate you inviting me on.

Well, thank you. I appreciate you being here today. So I wonder if we could start today, because I think this is something a lot of people don't know, and I knew a little bit of it, but you were able to inform me so much more about the history of CCLI and how it actually started, not as a corporation, but as a ministry out of a church. And it was a fascinating story, and I, I'd love if you could just kind of share that with us today as we begin.

Yeah, so it actually goes back to 1984, um, when, um, uh, the pastor of, uh, Bible— of then Bible Temple in Portland, Oregon, became aware of a copyright lawsuit for $3.1 million that was pending against the Archdiocese of Chicago. And, you know, if we remember, for those of us old enough to remember, in the '80s, photocopiers were just kind of making their way through things, and it was easy to start reproducing things. And The pastor went to the then music minister, our founder Howard Racinski, and said, "Hey, Howie, I'd prefer not to get sued. Can you figure this out?" So we started in the back music ministry office of a church, and in 1985, Howard began kind of developing this permission of use concept where churches could obtain a blanket license for specific copy activities. And it kind of ran as this, this kind of prototype ministry out of the church for about 3 and a half years. Wow. And then in 1988, we kind of grew up and graduated to a real company. And that's kind of the official start of CCLI is in October of 1988. And the CCLI you know today, out of just kind of this prototype It was really just striving to find a way to make copyright easy for churches and kind of COVID those permissions that could potentially get them in trouble with the advent of, you know, things like photocopiers and easier reproduction of lyrics.

So, wow. You know, it's interesting because I'm studying at Loyola, which is a Catholic university, and I'm in a Christian doctrine class right now. And I think they would be fascinated to know that the Catholic Church actually actually had a, uh, a hand in the, the formation of CCLI in the beginning, because it's not necessarily always thought of, um, as something that is associated with Catholicism. But also, as we talked about before, we are seeing more of that. We're seeing liturgies and we're seeing different, uh, helps to Masses and things like that on CCLI's website. So it's, it's interesting the way that it's all kind of coming back around to that too. Well, One thing that I think we kind of maybe got wrong on my podcast before, whenever I was having this conversation with my friends, is I think that there's a misconception that CCLI is like a collection agency that is waiting to— if you don't report this right, we're going to come and knock on your door and extract a tax from you or something like that. And the reality is different than that, isn't it?

Yeah, we are just an aggregator of rights. You know, we've never been sued. We've never sued anyone. We're not there to enforce a specific set of rights because ultimately we're not the owners. Actually, one of the core tenets of CCLI, if you go back and you look at some of our, like, documentation from, like, the early '80s, was, you know, it says that we should not have publishing activities coinciding with licensing activities, meaning we should never own rights. We should just be kind of Switzerland as an aggregator and steward to those rights to the church. So that's always been part of our DNA, is to just be of service to the church and provide a way to avoid the complexities of copyrights, get them legal, but, and also provide compensation for copyright owners. So for those who are spending their life writing songs to edify Christ and edify the church and have people engage in worship, we're there to provide them some additional revenue.

So— sorry, I had my mic muted for a minute. Yeah, and I appreciate you explaining that to us because it's nice to know that CCLI is actually helping churches to stay legal, which is— it's an interesting thing because there are such things as copyright laws out there that CCLI wouldn't necessarily get litigious about. But CCLI is actually trying to protect churches from that kind of thing happening to them. And so that— I think that's an important distinction that a lot of people don't realize when they're thinking about the things that happen and— or the things that could happen with their churches potentially. And the basis that I wanted to point out is like CCLI didn't create these copyright rules. I think a lot of people think like they came up with it and we've got to abide by it, and in actuality it's not that. It's kind of the other way around, that these rules are in place, and so they're constantly looking into and frankly doing kind of some of the boring work of like what makes this legal and what makes not legal, you know, and how can we help churches, as you said. I'd love to— while we're on this topic, let's talk about the CCLI Top 100 a little bit. And this is another misconception that I think people have, and it was interesting to find out more about how that works. I think oftentimes we think of it as, oh, CCLI has done maybe this promotion of these particular artists, and they've tossed enough money their way that now they're going to get them featured on this list and it's going to grow higher. In actuality, that's not the case as to how it works. And I, I was— found it fascinating to find out about how that works and how CCLI doesn't editorialize about things other than they are showing ways that churches are using songs. And, and I think that the charting system is interesting in itself, just even in the last 10 years, in the way that that chart has changed so much, you know, in the styles of music and things like that that the churches are using. But could you talk to us a little bit about that though? I'd love to hear more.

Yeah, actually it's one of my favorite topics, uh, coming from technology and data. Uh, the Top 100 is forever fascinating to me. But, uh, kind of to go back with the intent of it, it, it was always meant to be just a reflection of what churches were doing. And from the CCI perspective, it was just like, yeah, this is for the last 6 months and just so you know, the top 100 charts that people mainly know is the last 6 months of activity for the churches. So it's an aggregate of that. And it's just saying, hey, these are the most popular songs in church as they have been reported to us. So there, what we didn't realize is then when we start just kind of, you know, took our, took our head out of the sand a little bit, started looking around, and there's these people writing these blog posts about it. There's these people doing an analysis of it and they're doing year-over-year comparisons or period-over-period comparisons and writing these like little editorial pieces about it. Much pontification on like social media, like in Facebook about all the stuff. And then we go, I guess this top 100 thing is kind of important. Maybe we should pay a little more attention to it. And to go to like the economy of everything that we do, I think that's important. When we talked, I mentioned also that We have blanket agreements, so I think it's important for people who are rights holders or just kind of know how kind of the economy of all that works on the back end. You as a rights holder, Rick Lee James, you get exactly the same deal as the biggest publisher in the world. Everyone has the same deal, everyone has the same rates, so it's kind of just this fair economy that, you know, songs that perform well, you know, have an opportunity to really bless those songwriters. So, um, the— again, the Top 100 is, um, an interesting thing as just a chart. So, um, I think it's unique in the fact that, yes, in the last couple years, as you mentioned, it's more and more— we're seeing a little more churn at the top of the charts. But we also have these things where we've had songs in the Top 100 for 30 years. Wow. Um, so, you know, Lord I Lift Your Name on High, uh, has been there. A little-known fact, um, that is the reason, uh, Shout to the Lord never got to number one, uh, is because of Rick Lee James and Lord I Lift Your Name on High.

Wow.

Uh, kept— and it was number one for like 7 years, uh, because it was just really a song that was resonating in the church. So if you go, it's really, if you go look at it, it's a really interesting reflection of just this wonderful mix that we have in the church of things that are really these touchstones for us as Christians, the songs of comfort, the songs that we grew up with and know. When you get a little further down the chart, but also these new expressions that are connecting in a new and fresh way. So yeah, I love the Top 100 because it's one of the only charts that you're gonna see in all of music that has, you know, things in the Top 100 for 30 years, but is also reflecting, you know, kind of these new expressions of worship that are connecting with church. So it's a great amalgam of what happens in churches collectively across the world. And we do have charts, for each country. Um, and because of that new emphasis of like, we're paying attention to the charts, um, on SongSelect, we actually— you can go see by country. We've actually broken it down like by decade so people can go back and, and look at some of those things as well, uh, to see how they change. So, but again, the end of the day, they're just a reflection of what's happening on Sundays.

Well, that's fascinating to me, and I, I, that— I didn't know that about Lori Lift Your Name On High, that it—

and, and it's still on the chart.

Is that correct? That it's still there? Yeah. Wow, that's amazing to me. Um, and I think that's, that's an interesting thing about church culture too, maybe in the way that churches have— and this is a terrible word to use when it comes to churches, but I'm going to say it anyway because I can't think of a better term— the way that churches consume things. Because I try not to be like consumeristic in, um, in church. And a matter of fact, it's, it's always the opposite. I want churches to think of themselves less as consumers and more as disciples when it comes to that. But there is a way that it seems like our churches consume music differently now than they did, say, over the last 30 years. I know that streaming has changed the game significantly. Most— while radio is still a presence, a lot of it has changed from instead of just like turning on the radio and hearing a song necessarily. We have so many different sources that I think churches pull from. What's interesting to me as one who goes out and, for instance, next month I'll be in Kansas City leading music for a concert. And as I prayerfully consider songs, I think, what song can I do that everybody that's going to be coming from— it's actually an international audience that's coming. Like, what song can I pick that everybody's going to know? And I actually do find it a helpful tool to use when I look at those charts and things just as a way to say, this is probably something people are going to know. You know, whenever we're singing together. Because what you don't want to do is like make it an entire service of brand new songs that people can't sing along to in some ways. So it is interesting that the chart operates and works on that level. So thank you for explaining that to us. I really appreciate it. And, and just that, that CCLI itself is not a publisher and, and that it's not, you know, doing this of itself and publishing this music. It actually is just a reflection of what the church is using. So that's a— I think that's something a lot of us maybe were confused about, so I'm glad for that clarification. And, you know, don't go right ahead.

Oh, I'm saying just for those of you who are maybe SongSelect users, um, so the Top 100 is every 6 months. For those of you who want to know kind of more recently, there's a Most Popular, um, section on SongSelect, and that's just the songs from the last week. So if you want to see what's going on, like, seasonally, like, it'll be all Easter songs right now. Yeah, as we're leading up in, into Easter Sunday. So that's another way of looking at what we do that's reflecting— it's a little bit more current than an aggregate of every 6 months. So if there's a season you're interested in or kind of what churches are doing as an aggregate on a weekly basis, that's another way of looking at kind of that macro activity.

Well, let me ask you one other thing real quick, because you explained this to me. I think that sometimes because none of us work at CCLI, most of us don't, maybe a few employees will listen to this episode and that I'll— what I just said is false. But I think for those of us that aren't in the world of working on there, we can sometimes think that maybe the organization is this enormous behemoth that is just, you know, everywhere and watching everywhere and doing everything. I was fascinated to find out how small the organization really is when it comes down to it. And you just, you just have a lot of workhorses there that are doing jobs. And the thing about music engravers that you have like 3 on staff that are working to put music on for the whole church. And tell us a little bit about kind of the— it must be kind of a family atmosphere around there, or seem like it.

Yeah, um, we just have the honor of having really long-tenured employees. So I mean, I'm the new guy at 13 years, uh, and we have some 30, um, 20 years. So It's, it is people work together a long time, done life together a long time, and just really enjoy each other. There's, there's a lot of the team that I played with for years on the platform as well. So it's not only if we work together and we've served the church together in the CCLI capacity, we see each other on Sundays and we're serving on Sundays on worship teams together. As well. So yeah, it's a very, very amazing group of people who I love dearly and love coming to work every day and seeing. And to talk about just like the scale of it, yeah, I think that's the whole— we can be perceived as an institution, but all of CCLI is, you know, just around 100 people. And, you know, we do have offices around the world. We have an office in South Africa. It's only 2 people, small office in the UK, an office in Germany, a small office in Australia, an office in Korea, because that's just kind of where, you know, as we've grown, we've been led to kind of serve for those regions. And a big part of what we do, and I think it's, it's nice to know that, you know, we're really focused on serving the world. If you ever go to any of our websites and you go to the bottom right-hand corner and you look down at all the languages that we, we have our services in, you know, there's a lot of languages that we are serving and a lot of cultures that we're serving. So to know that it's, it's international, just not, just not a North American thing as well.

Yeah.

Well, and that's so to get to your engraver question though. Yeah. So Yeah, so a lot of times we don't get sheet music anymore when loading things up. A lot of times we'll just get the recording from the label and the publisher, and we have an amazing group of guys that literally— probably one of the best jobs in the world is you get to listen to new worship songs and then create the charts for them. So, and that goes on every day. There's a giant queue of things they're trying to work through. And the process is just kind of prioritizing, you know, what we see the church is using. So if there's a song that's coming up, making sure that we're trying to be timely in that, or if there's a new release, there's some excitement about making sure at least we have those key songs there for that first couple of weeks, if not the week of a release too. And it's trying to balance all of those things with a very small production team.

Sure. Well, and that must be an incredibly daunting task too, as fun as it probably is to, to hear, uh, the music when it's fresh and coming out. That's— it's a lot of work to, to transcribe songs. And then I, I think one thing that's interesting too, because I talked about on the other podcast, you know, how it would be nice if, if there was a way to upload sheet music that you already have, um, like into the portals, like when you're when you've written a song and you're adding it to CCLI and things like that. But then in talking to you, I realized there's actually a uniformity that the music, it would be good if it could all kind of look a certain way, you know, and have this form to it and shape that is easy to use and look and recognize. So I understand too some of the challenges that could be there if somebody decided, I want to put my own chart or my own sheet music up. Well, then what if it's wrong and it's the, you know, it's not even in a format that can be used in a lot of ways. So, but then you had told me as well that you're also working to kind of make it a little bit more like user-friendly interface when it comes to things like that. So I wondered if you had any, anything that you could share with my listeners today, just some things that CCLI is working to make better and ways that they're trying to reach out as far as maybe technology-wise or as far as the publishers and ways that they can use it. I'd just love to hear any thoughts you had there.

So the last couple years, we've really worked hard at self-registration for songwriters. So we have— once you've affiliated with us, and if you're interested in affiliating, you just send an email to rights@ccla.com. We have a great team that will send out all the agreements, and those are all DocuSign. And but once you're in there, you can register your own songs, you can create your own rights shares, you can create your and manage your catalogs, upload your lyrics, and we do have an approval process to make sure that they're not conflicting with existing copyrights. Someone in our company had to go through and make a naughty word list to make sure that there's nothing there that's not inappropriate, that's not, you know, that everything's appropriate for the church, and within 24 hours, generally during a weekday, of uploading a set of lyrics, your lyrics can be available on SongSelect, uh, once you're kind of in our rights holder, uh, kind of ecosystem. Now, um, on the chord sheet side, um, we are working on— and we've developed our own editor, uh, for that. We've been using that to create our own chord sheets and now just working on getting it into the rights portal as well. So at least for the ChordPro and ChordSheet side of things. On the sheet music side, it's a little more complex, and this is where my— all those years as Chief Technology Officer might show through a little bit. We're using an underlying format called MusicXML, so we're just storing that notation as, as literally a format of text. And that gives us the ability, when you go into SongSelect, you can we can do the right paper size. So it's either, you know, A4 for Europe or standard 8.5 by 11 for North America. You can reflow it, you can flip it to portrait or landscape, you can enlarge it, right? You can do all of those things to make it usable for your team or you as a musician, along with all the time figuring out all the fun things like stem flipping and all those little nuances of making sheet music look right. You know, eventually we hope to have it where we can offer some of that through our rights portal as well, but given the complexity of getting it looking right, we just want to make sure that it is consistent for us. And that's been a big hallmark of what we've done. The reason people go to SongSelect, the reason they use our services, is because they are consistent. They know exactly what they're going to get, right?

Well, and that, and that honestly, that is a big help. I, I use SongSelect with, you know, music stand on, on Sunday mornings a lot, you know. And, and that's, that's been so much better for me than like, let's have a music stand and flipping the pages constantly. Um, and I've gotten about half of our team used to using like their iPads and things. And so the songs, uh, you know, usually come formatted in, in a way that we can use and report. And it's, it's been a good thing for us, you know, to have that. I'd say a good number of our songs that we use come, you know, from CCLI in that way, and the format is very nice to have in that way where you can read it. So it's really great. Um, well, let me think before our time runs out. I want to make sure that before Zoom decides to cut us off on our conversation in a few minutes here that we hit on everything that we wanted to talk about. Maybe you could talk to us a little bit about some of the other facets of CCLI that maybe people don't always think about, maybe even some of the exciting things that you might be working on. And you already talked about some with the sheet music thing, but there are things like Worship Fuel and Open Mic and other tools that CCLI offers even in the video side of things to help people listen to new songs and things like that. Could you talk to us a little bit about that?

Yeah, a big part of, you know, what we do is the equipping part The licensing part itself is pretty boring, right? It's in effect car insurance for your church to cover the licensing activities. But our heart is always to equip the church. So with Worship Fuel, we're always working with great content creators to find articles that are practical, equipping things for you. There's also, like you mentioned, there's the New Song Cafe. So if you're a songwriter, and you're registered with CCLI or even have a new song and are interested in registering, there's a mechanism there to get your song into that. A lot of times, well, pre-COVID, we would work with artists to get these more stripped-down versions and acoustic versions of songs out there, and we're doing that. Also, we continue to make enhancements inside of our products on On SongSelect, it now supports Nashville numbering, it supports soul fledge, two-column, so just continuing to make improvements there. And also just continuing to partner with as many companies as we can to make it easy for you to get Sunday done. So SongSelect has an API and it integrates into most major presentation software, planning software, software, MusicStand software, so you're not downloading and reimporting stuff. We have direct connections into most major software platforms to really make it easy to access the content that you have and continuing to try to grow that, that, that, those partnerships. So there's a lot of things that we do outside of the licensing to really focus in on, on how are we adding value and serving. And another one is if you're a CCLI customer, if you log in there's a little benefits section. So kind of using our name, we're trying to go drive discounts as best we can for things we think churches might be interested in. So there's a variety of benefits in there from a, I mean, a great mixed collection of things like free tickets to Museum to the Bible to half-off music instruction websites or discounts on Vimeo if you're interested in streaming. So again, we're also trying to find every way we can to really just bring benefit to the church just beyond that legal side of things of what we do.

Well, and while you're saying that, those benefits to the church, that's another thing I wanted to make sure that we pointed out is you had explained not every company can work with you just because of the way that they would want to put money back in. And it's a way that because of the way that CCLI is set up, Again, I think the misconception is the CCLI is just finding all the ways it can to rake in money off, off of church people. And so then we have that. But explain how that's not necessarily— I mean, not even the case when there was a music store, for instance, that you had mentioned when we talked that was like, we'd love to work with you, but we can't because of this reason. Yeah.

So it was a large online music retailer, really wanted to get us in their affiliate program. And I asked a really awkward backward question, which was, okay, I would love to, but anything that you would give us in affiliate fees, I just want to pass back as a discount to the church. Um, because there's no need for us to be kind of involved in that, in that transaction. Um, we would just really like to drive that savings to the church. So we're not an affiliate with that very large online music retailer. Um, you know, it's just because for those type of things, uh, we really are church people ourselves. You know, as you mentioned, using the SongSelect products yourself, I mean, for 20+ years on the platform. I have been a customer as well. I feel like the guy from the Hair Club for Men saying, you know, I'm not only the president, but I'm also a member where, you know, everything that we make, I'm using also on a Sunday. So as an end user.

Well, I was just going to say that helps because you, you know how it works too. So if there's bugs in it, you know, it kind of helps you to know this is something we could do better. And it is nice to know that the connection to the, to the local church in that way.

Yeah. And when most of your friends are worship leaders, you, you, and they have your cell phone number, you definitely get the call if something's not right.

So I bet that's the case. Oh man. Well, this has been great and informative, and I wanted to let everybody know too that hopefully we can have you back in the future to talk about some things that aren't necessarily CCLI-related, because I know that you're passionate about a lot of things. And we've already talked about, you know, your guitar playing, and that would be a fun topic just to sit around and talk guitar gear and stuff for a while. But I know that you have a lot on your heart and a lot on your mind, even just in our conversations we've had and the few emails we've passed back and forth between each other. I've appreciated your heart for the Lord that has shown through, and you, you could have been very, uh, within your rights to, to write to me and go, you guys really messed this up and I'm angry at you and whatever. And, and you didn't. Your approach was, was very Christlike. And, and, you know, just saying, you know, we, we don't always get everything right, but I'd love for you to hear some of my heart for this company that I love and that I've worked for. And so I just wanted to say thank you for, for your gracious and kind attitude. And even just to have this conversation today, it's been so good. I wonder if there is anything that we have missed that you were hoping we would talk about today? And I always want to give my guests a chance if there's something that, that I haven't mentioned or a direction we haven't taken that the listeners might benefit from, or you feel like they could. Um, do you feel like there's anything that you'd like to hit on that we haven't today?

Yeah, I think there's one important part of, um, what we do, and that's, um, you know, we talked about CCLI being the legal side of things, but But the part that's more important to me is the impact that we have on songwriters in the sense of we're allowing them through what we do to really focus on the ministry of what they were called to do. You know, yes, it is a very practical thing that we do, you know, in terms of just applying licensing and making sure rights holders get paid, but in rights holders getting paid, that is really a way for those rights holders to focus on the ministry that they've been called to and really use the gifts they've been given to really glorify God, and, you know, at the end of the day, it's about reaching people with the gospel through song. For us, it's a mission, so being part of that economy, even if it's a very practical part of it is the fulfilling part for me, knowing that that's what I'm doing and that's what I'm part of. And, you know, we even talked about a mutual friend of ours and a story I shared on another podcast about really the impact that what we've done had on the course of his life and his ministry.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. And I'm grateful. Grateful for that for him because that particular artist that— and again, I want listeners to notice how we're not naming anybody because CCLI is again like Switzerland here. They're not trying to promote one artist or another, but the particular artist that we were talking about, he's been not only an influence and a help to me as a music leader, but just as a friend through the years and somebody who's been such an encouragement to not only me, but so many like songwriters and worship leaders and pastors. And I know that in many ways CCLI facilitated for this person to be able to do that in a bigger way than they would have otherwise and enabled more songs for the church to come out. So I'm very grateful for that. Well, George, this has been a real pleasure and I hope we can do it again sometime. And thank you for spending some time with me today and helping not only me but my listeners have some clarification about about some of the things that CCLI does, the way that they are connecting with the local church. And, and I just appreciate having this conversation with you today. So I say this to my guests every week, and I get to say it to you now. George Ross, thank you for being one of the Voices in My Head this week.

Thank you, Rick. It's been great. And anytime you want me back, just drop me an email.

Will do.

Thank you for joining me here this week on Voices in My Head. I hope you'll visit me on my website at rickleejames.com, where you can find out more about me, get my music on vinyl and CD, follow my blog, and even schedule me for a concert or a speaking engagement. Better yet, even a book signing in your neighborhood. You can find all that and more at rickleejames.com. Also, it would mean a great deal to me if you could write a review of this podcast on iTunes. The more positive reviews that we receive, the more visible this podcast will be online. And now for the benediction: May the God of hope fill you with all joy and peace in believing, so that by the power of the Holy Spirit you may abound in hope. God bless you, and thank you for listening to Voices in My Head.