Blog | Where to Find Great Affordable Church Media
Where to Find Great Affordable Church Media
The modern church relies heavily on media for worship music, lyric and sermon slides, sermon videos, livestreams, and social media. The reason is simple – media can aid in communicating a message clearly. Audio and visuals accompany messages to make them “stick” with people.
Whether it’s premade and purchased videos and mini-movies, or separate media components for in-house video production, finding quality church media at an affordable price can be really difficult.
Finding Affordable, Quality Church Media: Great Sources
If your church is trying to find quality, affordable church media for worship, video production, sermon visuals, or anything else, here are a few recommendations:
Royalty Free Music
Tons of churches are producing their own in-house videos. Whether you have a dedicated camera or are simply using your iPhone, it doesn’t take much to get started with simple video production for announcements, missions stories, youth retreat recaps, and other ministry activities.
However, one of the hardest things to find when producing videos in-house is royalty free music. If you need quality songs for your church videos, these are a few great sources:
Soundstripe
Most subscription-based royalty-free music sources are incredibly expensive, easily stretching into the region of hundreds of dollars per month. Don’t even get us started on purchasing individual songs…
Soundstripe gives you access to unlimited downloads of royalty-free music starting at ~$11 per month. For somewhere around $20 per month, you get access to sound effects and individual music track stems, which makes it a super affordable royalty-free music solution for church video makers.
Artlist
Artlist is yet another great royalty-free music source that’s available at a fraction of the cost most companies are charging. It’s a couple dollars per month more than Soundstripe, but still incredibly affordable for most churches.
Artlist also has pricing levels that give you access to sound effects for video production, which is an added bonus.
Worship Tracks
Perhaps one of the biggest media pieces churches need are worship tracks. Running tracks from a computer can fill the empty space in the music, fill in for missing instruments, and help “glue” the sound together.
Problem is, they’re spendy…
Really spendy.
If you need tracks for your worship team at an affordable cost, here are some options:
Google “Free Worship Pads”
Obviously, worship pads aren’t going to be the same as full tracks for a song, but it’s often the only thing you really need to glue the song together and fill space. Furthermore, unlike full band tracks that are difficult to find and extremely expensive, there are dozens of producers who have recorded and released various free packs of worship pads in every key you’d need. Even “preview” packs with only a few keys can easily be transposed in your DAW software.
Loop Community
Loop Community is another popular worship tracks resource. It’s much friendlier pricing than some of the main players in the industry (like Multitracks), but the best part is that they have community-created uploads. In other words, thousands of artists have recorded their own individual stems of songs that often sound just as good as the original, and they’re selling full packs of stems around $10 per song which is an amazing deal.
After clicking the “Songs” tab, click the first dropdown menu and select “Community” and you’ll see all community-member-created tracks.
Loop Community also offers a super affordable track-launching software which is great for churches who don’t have the budget to invest in an expensive (and often over-powered) DAW software like Ableton.
Countdowns and Worship Backgrounds
This is sort of the “poster child” of what anyone thinks of when they hear “Church Media”. It’s true – churches never have enough countdowns and worship backgrounds. When you think of it, you may be using two backgrounds per song and your worship team is playing 3-5 songs per Sunday. At 52 weeks per year, that’s a potential need for roughly 200-to-400 worship background videos (and that’s assuming every single background option available works with every single song your team plays throughout the year)… That’s a lot.
The issue is, most worship background media providers are insanely expensive, costing hundreds of dollars per year. Unfortunately, while individual purchases from distribution sites may seem “cheap” as standalone items, $10-$20 per piece gets really expensive when you need hundreds of backgrounds and several mini-movies.
So what are your options?
Pexels
This isn’t an all-in-one solution, and you’ll have to get creative here. But Pexels has tons of free, royalty-free images that you can use for backgrounds during your worship services. Obviously, your options are limited, but it’s worth browsing the site to see if you can find some unique pictures or abstract images that may work well with worship lyrics and sermon slides.
Motion Worship
I know, I know – “Oh here they are promoting their own media in a blog post!” If you already have an affordable church media provider you like, then great! But if you’re looking for quality media at a fraction of the cost of what other sites are charging, we’d have to put ourselves out there.
Our subscription options start at $29 per year (NOT per month) and don’t get any more expensive than $79 for the entire year. For $29 you get access for an entire year to all of our mini-movies; for $50 you get access to all countdowns, motion backgrounds, and still images for the entire year; and for $79 you get access to everything on our site for the year.
We don’t mean to “market ourselves” in a blog post, but we honestly have maintained the same pricing since we started and our site is now populated with over 2,000+ videos. Browse the site and see if anything sticks out to you!
Final Note
Unless you have an unlimited budget, everyone has to get creative with the resources they have available. Even free, royalty-free image sites like Pexels have some excellent content for presentation slides. You may have to do some digging to find what you want, but all the above resources are great places to start looking for what your church needs.
About the Author
Chris Fleming is a professional musician from Minneapolis, MN who has played with artists such as TAYA, Big Daddy Weave, and Jason Gray. He is actively involved with the worship music scene and has contributed as a drummer, music director, song writer, and producer for various worship artists and churches locally and nationally. Chris is the Motion Designer at Motion Worship, helping to create motion background collections and countdowns for our subscribers.
Thank you for all information to helping us.