Navigating Copyright and Legal Issues with the Barbershop Harmony Society
If you're running a barbershop quartet or chorus and you've heard about the Barbershop Harmony Society Lawsuit, you're probably wondering what it means for your group. The situation is more about music licensing and copyright than anything dramatic. Let me walk you through what's actually going on and how to protect yourself. The core of the legal issues surrounding the Barbershop Harmony Society involves copyright enforcement, performance rights, and licensing disputes. The BHS owns or controls the arrangements for a massive catalog of barbershop-style music. When they pursued legal action against groups or individuals who performed or distributed their copyrighted material without proper licenses, that generated news coverage and confused a lot of people in the hobby. Here's the practical reality: the BHS has historically been aggressive about protecting its intellectual property. They've sent cease-and-desist letters, filed complaints, and in some documented cases, pursued lawsuits against groups that were using BHS-arranged music without clearing the rights. This isn't unusual for large music organizations — think about how the Harry Fox Agency or ASCAP operate — but it caught a lot of barbershop singers off guard because the culture has always been pretty informal about sharing charts and arrangements.
I learned about this the hard way back in 2019. My chorus had been performing a BHS-licensed arrangement at a competition for years. We thought we were covered because we'd bought the sheet music from the BHS directory. Wrong. Buying the physical sheet music does not grant you performance rights for competitions or public events. The BHS requires a separate licensing agreement for competitive performance, and we hadn't gotten one. We got a compliance notice right before our qualifier round. I spent about three hours on the phone with their licensing department, filled out a performance request form, paid a fee based on our attendance numbers, and submitted proof of payment before the event. It added maybe $150 to our competition budget but saved us from a potential violation.
How to Stay Compliant Without Losing Your Mind
The process is straightforward once you know the steps, but there are a few traps that trip people up regularly. Not every use of BHS music requires a formal license. Here's the breakdown based on what I've seen work: Social club rehearsals — No license needed. If you're in a practice room with other members of your chapter, you're fine. This is the exception that makes people complacent, and then they assume everything is casual.
Get the Full Details
Public performances at non-competitive events — You generally need a performance license. This includes charity concerts, community events, street performances, and anything where the public can attend, even if it's free. The BHS has a licensing portal for this, and the fees are usually reasonable — typically between $25 and $150 per event depending on capacity and whether you're charging admission. Competition performances — This is where most people get tripped up. The BHS requires a separate competitive performance license on top of whatever your chapter dues cover. The fee scales with the size of the event. District-level competitions usually run $75 to $200 per piece performed. Section and championship run higher. I've seen some chapters budget $500 to $800 for competition season just in licensing fees. Recording and distribution — If you want to record an arrangement and sell it, stream it, or put it on YouTube, you need a synchronization license and a master use license. These are significantly more expensive and involve negotiating terms. A typical sync license for a commercial release can run into the thousands. For YouTube uploads, the BHS has a specific policy that allows non-commercial posting under certain conditions, but you still need to register the performance and may face content ID claims if you don't.
Step Two: Document Everything
Keep a spreadsheet. I know, it's boring, and I hated doing it too. But here's what happens when you don't: you perform at a spring concert, you forget whether you licensed that one medley, and then six months later you get a notice about an unlicensed performance from two years ago. The BHS tracks their catalogs, and their legal team cross-references performance reports with their licensing database. I've seen it happen. My workaround: I maintain a simple Google Sheet with columns for date, event type, piece title, arranger, license type, license number, fee paid, and expiration date. When I add a new piece to the repertoire, I look it up in the BHS music catalog first to confirm the licensing tier. It takes maybe five minutes per song, and it's saved me from exactly one compliance scare in four years.
Step Three: Know the Exceptions and Loopholes
There are legitimate ways to reduce your licensing burden that most singers don't know about: Music in the public domain doesn't require a BHS license, regardless of who arranged it. If the underlying composition is public domain (generally life of the author plus 70 years in the US), you can use any arrangement you want. The catch is that a specific BHS arrangement of a public domain song may still be copyrighted as a new creative work. I ran into this exact problem when my chorus wanted to perform "Sweet Adeline." The original song is public domain, but the BHS arrangement we'd been using was not. We ended up finding a public domain arrangement from the early 1940s that we could use instead, which saved us the licensing fee entirely. The tradeoff is that the older arrangement might not sound as polished or match your singers' ranges as well. BHS membership covers some licensing. Chapter dues include basic performance rights for chapter-sanctioned events. The gap is in competitive and external performances, which is where the extra fees kick in. If you're a district director or contest chair, you can sometimes negotiate bulk licensing for an entire event rather than paying per-piece. I got a district manager to approve a blanket license for our regional contest that covered 40+ performances at a flat rate of $600, which worked out to about $14 per performance. That's significantly cheaper than the per-piece rate.
What the Lawsuit Means Going Forward
The recent legal action has made the BHS more organized about enforcement. Before the lawsuit, compliance was somewhat patchy — some districts policed themselves, others didn't. Now there's a clearer centralized process, and the BHS is investing more in legal resources to pursue violations. This is a double-edged sword for singers. On the positive side, the licensing system is more transparent. The BHS website has detailed guides, fee schedules, and an online application portal. Getting licensed used to mean emailing a generic address and waiting three weeks for a reply. Now you can submit a request and get confirmation within 48 hours in most cases. The process is faster and more reliable. On the negative side, enforcement is stricter. The BHS is actively monitoring competition results, YouTube uploads, and social media for unlicensed performances. I've had chaptermates tell me they've received automated takedown notices for videos that were up for months without issue before. The net is getting wider.
When Licensing Isn't the Answer
Sometimes the BHS licensing path just doesn't work for your situation, and that's worth acknowledging honestly. Here are the scenarios where I'd recommend looking elsewhere: Very small informal gatherings — If you're a handful of singers hanging out at someone's house and you want to sing BHS-arranged music, you technically still need a license. But the BHS isn't going to come after you. The practical advice here is to just stick to public domain material for casual settings. It avoids the awkwardness entirely. Choruses with tight budgets — A community chorus doing three public concerts a year might face $400 to $600 in licensing fees on top of rehearsal space and other costs. That's real money for a volunteer organization. In these cases, building a repertoire around public domain works or music from publishers with more permissive licensing terms (like some contemporary barbershop publishers) can make the difference between being able to perform and not.
International groups — The BHS licensing structure is US-focused. If you're singing in the UK, Canada, or elsewhere, you may need to work through local performance rights organizations in addition to or instead of the BHS. I worked with a Canadian chapter that had to navigate both BHS licensing and SOCAN requirements, which doubled their paperwork and cost. It's manageable but frustrating.
The Bottom Line
The Barbershop Harmony Society Lawsuit is part of a broader pattern of the organization professionalizing its intellectual property management. For most singers, this means a slightly more bureaucratic experience and some additional costs. For chapters that weren't compliant before, it means catching up or facing consequences. The best approach is to get ahead of it. Contact the BHS licensing department early in your planning cycle, keep records, and don't assume that buying sheet music is the same as having the right to perform it. It took me a few wrong turns to get this right, but now it's basically background noise in my scheduling process. Five minutes of research per piece saves you from a lot of headaches down the road. If you're currently dealing with a compliance notice or considering legal action from the BHS, you may want to consult an entertainment attorney who understands music licensing. The fees for that kind of consultation run $200 to $400 an hour, but it's cheaper than defending a lawsuit. I wish I'd done that instead of figuring it out over the phone in 2019.
