Dios está aquí

Short history of the song

"Dios está aquí" is one of the most famous and sung contemporary Christian hymn. While its author is a Catholic, it may be described as a "non-denominational song and have been adopted by a great variety of Christian churches.
Francisco Javier Gacías Mateo wrote it for the band Nueva Vida in which he was performing and created it during the Jesús Te Llama festival of Christian music in Zaragoza, Spain, on June 9th, 1979.
He registered the song on September 14th, 1990 at SGAE (Sociedad General de Autores y Editores de España) because his friend Carmelo Erdozaín wanted to publish a K7 of fifteen Christian hymns and song. Javier Gacias always intended the song to be freely used by people during religious functions. Nevertheless, the song become a global it. Many singers and publishers thought it was a traditional song and registered the text and a musical arrangement under their own name. SGAE badly managed for a while the rights of its member artists and the author had to fight with the society and several foreign music publishers to recover a part of the royalties that pertained to him for the commercial exploitation of the song. One of the most popular version of the song had been released by Grupo Mojado in 1999 and had been credited to Ramón González Guerrero y Juan Salazar.
The author had to make a deal with Universal Music Group and Raúl Galeano that acted as publishers, but never sued the musicians themselves that could have been received royalties in good faith or paid for a fixed fee by the producers. His lawyers somewhat succeeded at changing the status of version that have been registered as original works as adaptations or arrangements, but never tried to deal with non-profit organizations or predication Christian music bands. That's why so many homonym songs that use quite the same melody and quite the same text exist in author societies.

The UNISON identifier of the original song is CO2Q7O2HID2E.

Sources

• 'Dios está aquí', pero la justicia no: la lucha contra la SGAE del creador del célebre himno religioso, Carlos H. Vázquez, 10 de julio del 2022, El Periódico de España, Madrid, España.