You bring the song.
We just hold the room.
A short note on why MySingCircle doesn't come with a built-in songbook, and why that's a deliberate choice — not a missing feature.
- 01
Lyrics belong to someone
Song lyrics are copyrighted by music publishers — almost always for the writer's lifetime plus seventy years. The band you love wrote the words, but the rights to print them sit with a publishing company. A chord chart that includes those lyrics is a derivative of that copyrighted work.
- 02
Why we don't ship a songbook
Hosting a public catalog of chord charts means licensing every song from its publisher. That's what services like CCLI (for worship) and the major-label clearinghouses (for everything else) exist to do, and the licensing is per-end-user and per-use. Building it the right way isn't something a small tool can credibly do.
- 03
Bringing your own chart is a different thing
When you load a chord chart you already have — pasted from your own notes, exported from a tool you license, or imported from a public source — and use it inside a single live session with people in the room, you're much closer to private performance than public distribution. That's territory the law treats more kindly, and it's the lane MySingCircle stays in.
- 04
Your songs stay with you
We don't store your charts on our servers. The playlist lives in your browser, scoped to the room. Other people in the session see the chord chart only while they're connected; nothing gets indexed, archived, or shared beyond your circle.
None of this is legal advice. Copyright is fact-specific and jurisdiction-specific. If you're running ticketed events, public broadcasts, or anything beyond a small group of musicians and singers in the same room, a CCLI / publisher license is the right path — and using your licensed source materials with MySingCircle is exactly the use case we're built for.