Playing Your Favorite Tune at High School Events – Safely and Legally

“We are the champions” is a line uttered by thousands of high school students annually. They excelled in athletes, music, forensics, debate, theatre and other school supported activities, and proudly announced their individual and team achievements and ultimate success. It is also sung by millions of spectators and students alike in time with Queen’s 1977 hit of the same name.

And when that hit from Queen is played over the public-address system in a school sports facility from someone’s Spotify or AppleMusic account, they are breaking the law – unless the school has a public performance music license. U.S. Copyright Laws protect the intellectual property of the creator of works that are meant to be shared – be that creator an author, composer, painter, programmer or the like. Purchasing the music, software, photograph or painting provides you with the right to personally enjoy, use or display what you bought, but you cannot share it, give the software to another person to use, make a copy of the photograph to put on a website or play the music in a public setting.

Most schools now have the license needed from BMI or ASCAP, the two organizations that manage the copyrights for the vast majority of music artists. But that leaves selecting the pieces to be played during game warmups and the like. With today’s modern music lyrics including not only inappropriate language, but hidden meanings, an innocent selection by an athletic director, team manager or volunteer parent could find the athletic director in a meeting in the administrator’s office with legal counsel in attendance. No one in education has the time to research all of the music that dozens of school sports teams want to use as part of their warmups, halftimes and post-game activities.

Because the use of copyrighted music before, during and after athletic events is commonplace at all levels from youngsters to professionals, various companies now offer services to meet these needs. Primarily focused on professional sports and thus include a revenue stream and personalized announcements, these services are easily and well adaptable to high school sport events.

Given the uptick in attendance, use of technology and investment in facilities that many high schools are making, having a professional service manage the music (and DJ and ads) on your PA is often a worthwhile expense. And having the ability to customize that broadcast to include facility specific announcements, schedules of upcoming events, advertisements (if allowed by your school) and the like can make the expense even more justifiable.

The service provides music to match your needs but makes sure that it does not contain any profanity or hidden meanings. They provide deep research into each and every lyric, needed to provide the level of assurance and safety required for sharing with your varied audiences. The broadcast has a DJ and thus can include any announcement you wish your participants and spectators to hear including facility safety messages, team rosters, upcoming events or recognitions.

Connection to the service is most often done via a website where you can login to enter your schedule, recurring and onetime announcements and make music requests. You can preview what each will sound like and make adjustments or corrections in real time.

As long as you have a PA system to share your professional- sounding broadcast and a laptop, you can easily connect to your music service through their app and website. With each event’s broadcast predetermined, complete with music selections and announcements, simply plug-in your device as you would any other audio connection and click. Should things change during your event, adjustments to your broadcast schedule are easily made right on the app in real time. Some services offer the ability to play specific ‘walk-up’ tracks, or produce and air live sports play-byplay ability, while others include some hardware improvements and considerations.

Such services, like Neptune’s GameTime and Sports Audio DJ, offer various features, so you need to research to see which one offers the capabilities you are seeking for your facility and events. Most are as portable as your laptop so the service can move from auditorium to gymnasium to fieldhouse and then outside to your stadium or ballpark. You can build a library of announcements so that the safety message for each of your athletic events is easily available to be included when needed. And build a library of other announcements so that every athletic and public event over the course of a week or so will have the same message of upcoming activities and information. And these companies take care of the copyright licensing for you – quality, safe music for every event without the worry.

Steffen Parker is a retired music educator, event organizer, maple sugar maker, and Information Technology specialist from Vermont who serves as the Performing Arts/Technology representative on the NFHS High School Today Publications Committee. He received the NFHS Citation Award in 2017 and the Ellen McCulloch- Lovell Award in Arts Education in 2021. He can be reached at steffenparker@ gmail.com.