Cover Songs and Legallities

I just recently read an article entitled: "Critical Info for YouTube Musicians Who Perform Cover Songs."  It was written by Adam Rafferty and posted on his blog at Wordpress.  He brings up a lot of great points-to-ponder and I thought I would put in my two-cents-worth.

Adam has a great talent for playing a solo finger-style of guitar and does a number of different cover songs ranging from Michael Jackson to Stevie Wonder.  The particular works spoken about in his article is Michael Jackson’s “Billie Jean” and Stevie Wonder’s “Superstition”.

The mechanical license needed in order to legally cover these two songs, according to EMI as told by Adam about his enquiry, would be $2500.00 per song.  There are other options if it is impossible to pay such an exuberant amount, simply to play a song and show off your talent, as mentioned in the article also.  (Disclaimer - I don’t recommend some of these options, as some of them are geared toward continuous infringement of copyright.  I do not in any way endorse or uphold copyright infringement in any way.)  I went to a web site called Lime Light at songclearance.com to see how much it would cost if the license was purchased based on the number of copies either sold on CD, digitally downloaded, or streamed via the web.  Just the song “Billie Jean” on YouTube has 1,438,938 views.  So, to pay for a mechanical license in this format would cost Adam $14,404.38 at $.01 per stream.  That’s a ton of change just to show off your talent and try to establish a name for yourself and break into the industry.

I doubt very seriously if there would be any detriment to the publishing houses for people to cover songs of artists for whom they have the copyrights for the music of.  In fact, I tend to think that there would be a very decent way of knowing whom to pitch to sign onto your label when headhunting for new talent.

Do I think that licensing should be paid for should Adam and others like him decide to try and sell these cover songs?  Absolutely!  But, it has been mentioned on more than one occasion during this class, how a lot of the most famous names in this business were the cover artists of the past… I can’t help but wonder what greats of music past and present, would have never been heard of, if the copyright laws in key moments of music history were as limiting as the ones in place today.