Funeral music confusion

Fubar1953

I'm trying, at long last, to sort out a will and make some initial funeral arrangements for myself, including choosing some favourite music I'd like to be played. This is the part that confuses me as when my dad died in 2011, and he was a big fan of Shirley Bassey, I burned a couple of her songs to a CD and gave it to the funeral director but he said he couldn't play it at the crematorium due to copyright issues. He said he would have been able to play the tracks from the original recording but not tracks burned by myself. He ended up playing some bagpipe music instead which saddened me a bit as, although my dad was a proud Scot, he wasn't especially crazy about the pipes and I'm sure he would have much preferred to have Miss Bassey. I've checked a few funeral providers websites and none seem to mention the obstacle I encountered with my dad's funeral. I just wondered what other people had done with regard to providing personal music choices to funeral providers.

mjdh1957

For my late partner's funeral I burned a CD and gave it in to the crematorium no problem.

This was in Manchester - maybe different crematoriums have different rules

Mojisola

Our crematorium was able to provide all the music we asked for - specific tracks off particular cds.

Owain_Moneysaver

The funeral director was correct, strictly speaking. He will have had a PRS licence for playing the music, but copying a CD requires separate permission from MCPS.

https://www.prsformusic.com/help/what-is-the-difference-between-prs-and-mcps

In the past I've seen funeral directors with shelvesful of 'bootleg' cassettes of music. Now I expect they can download almost anything from a specialist music library that handles licencing and royalty payments for the funeral industry eg Wesley Music

Hermia

When I was arranging a funeral a few years back I just gave the titles of the songs to the funeral director and they sorted everything out. I assumed they had access to some sort of database of music they can use.

Keep_pedalling

Owain_Moneysaver wrote: »

The funeral director was correct, strictly speaking. He will have had a PRS licence for playing the music, but copying a CD requires separate permission from MCPS.

https://www.prsformusic.com/help/what-is-the-difference-between-prs-and-mcps

In the past I've seen funeral directors with shelvesful of 'bootleg' cassettes of music. Now I expect they can download almost anything from a specialist music library that handles licencing and royalty payments for the funeral industry eg Wesley Music

Not quite, it is the venue that needs to have the licence not the FD.

AnotherJoe

The officiant at my mums funeral (recent) played music of our choice which was her business as to how she obtained it but i suspect it was just from CDs she bought. And at my dads funeral (7 years ago) we provided a home produced CD and there was no issue with it though I imagine now that they were breaking the law re the music.

Was this a last minute thing from the FD otherwise why not just buy the relevant CD?

Anyway by the time you shuffle off this mortal coil they would be hunting round for a CD player in the same way you'd try to find a cassette player nowadays, so will play from a library they have rights to anyway.

[Deleted User]

My mum had bought CDs for the music she wanted, but when it came to it, all they wanted was the names of the tracks. The crematorium has a system with all the music on a database.

SeriouslyStressedOut

We recently chose 2 songs to be played at my mums funeral.

We gave the names of the songs and the funeral director said he would download them.

They were both played at the funeral but I have no idea whether he did download them or whether he had them on CD for example.

Dark_Star

I lent them 2 cds that had the required tracks on (from my late mum’s collection). The vicar posted them back to me later on.

No issues from anyone except if you’ve ever listened to the full version of Tom Jones “green green grass of home” it’s not actually that suitable for a funeral!

The vicar pointed that out but we managed to exit the church before the last verse...

Who knows what format the music will be played on, in the future?

pimento

A lot of crematoria use these people:

http://www.wesleymedia.co.uk/music-library/central.php

They have thousands of songs and if they don't have what you want, they will source it and add it to the database so that the next time it's there for anyone who asks.

They had all the music for my husband's funeral and the one Maori song they didn't have, they found and added to the database.

No CDs required.