Everybody Loves a Good Cover

Generational songs have the ability to make everyone stop, sing, or get lost in a nostalgia trip. This is why people love singing karaoke at parties or in bars. Local bands often make more money doing covers than originals, and social influencers launch whole careers singing other people’s songs. It’s something familiar, and we as the consumer want to love this new rendition and sing along, or vilify it for changing the original too much.

While major artists performing cover songs or even rerecording them for an album isn’t new, the mega-popstar Beyoncé recently came into the forefront for the two covers she dropped on her new album, Cowboy Carter. Beyoncé on her own is a major force. Her stepping outside her front door is newsworthy. Now add the fact that she covered the Beatles’ “Blackbird” and Dolly Parton’s “Jolene” for her album, and that’ll generate headlines.

The world of covers is a fascinating one. For the established artist a cover of one of their songs can revamp interest/relevancy in them and provide new forms of revenue. The established performer of the song gets a bit of a cheat code because they may not be writing anything new and now help capture the audience of the person they are covering often for permission or monetary exchange.

Sunday services are essentially a bunch of people gathered to sing along with a worship cover band. Churches are playing songs from artists such as Hillsong, Matt Redman, Chris Tomlin, Kari Jobe, Maverick City, and on and on. Funny enough, many of those popular worship leaders are doing covers of old hymns or worship songs that they revamped. So every Sunday we partake in an inception of covers of covers.

For fans, covers — and samplings — make up a huge and hugely fun part of the music listening experience. But for artists, they represent a complex part of the economy of music.

“Blackbird,” retitled as “Blackbiird” on Cowboy Carter, is originally credited as a Lennon-McCartney composition but was completely written and recorded by Paul McCartney for the Beatles’ White Album. “Blackbird” is a stand-in for “black girl” as Macca witnessed the racial tension of the 60s. It was written as a Civil Rights anthem. Beyonce kept the original musical recording intact sans vocals, which gives McCartney production credits on the song.

For the 1974 classic of Parton’s “Jolene,” from the album of the same name, Beyoncé reimagined much of the song and changed its meaning. The original meaning was about Parton begging this flirtatious Jolene character not to “take my man.” Bey’s version is about the woman her husband, rapper and music mogul Jay Z, cheated with, and she’s firing warning shots. Interestingly, although she changed a lot of the song, she gave full rights over to Parton.

These are music heavyweights. The average artist has virtually no shot at legally ever using songs of this magnitude and not being sued, hit with copyright infringements, or having a complete loss of royalties.

Singer, songwriter, and rapper Tylerhateslife experiences the hurdles of being an independent artist all the time. He has watched his social media grow to over half a million followers thanks in part to cover song mashups and stitches of known songs with his songs on TikTok and Instagram. It subsequently has led him to millions of plays on streaming services as well.

But it’s a risk he’s willing to take.

“Anybody can do a cover,” Tylerhateslife said. “Mashups and remixes take a bit more creativity. It makes it almost impossible to get it cleared for what a lot of artists could be putting out. It’s worth it because that song has already gone viral. It’s an amazing tool to grow a fan base and get people looking at your profile and monitoring you. In the process of doing that, you drop an original song after you grab that audience. Because of the fan base built off mashups, there is a built-in audience to hear the original.”

This makes sense within the context of an indie artist who is doing everything at a risk, unlike Beyoncé who has major label finances and a famous friends contact list. She didn’t need to do covers to get a larger audience.

Interestingly, the cover/mashup model of growing a fanbase can be applied to growing a congregation. One of the key elements of a church service is the praise and worship. How many churches have you ever attended on the regular that create their own worship songs? Most do not.

For local and indie artists who don’t have a built-in church audience to share their music with, most are left navigating the legality of streaming, social posts, and YouTube loopholes.

The license allows the song to be uploaded but all or a portion of the royalties are sent to the original artist.

He continued, “It’s pretty frustrating because I have an ear for music. I can hear melodies and there’s a lot of songs that I can hear the melody of one song and mash the other one with it. I also have a really good strategy to promote the songs on TikTok but because I can’t legally put them out, it gets frustrating.”

Tyler is not Beyoncé. But he is also a worship leader, and he regularly performs for churches and small groups and is even recording those songs for a live project series.

Venues and churches are supposed to be registered with a song licensing agency such as ASCAP or BMI so the owners of the songs are getting paid royalties. But it’s likely safe to assume that most, especially the churches, aren’t practicing this. Within the church world, praise and worship are so widespread it’s akin to the Wild West of song legality. The parameters are different.

“Normal” artists worry about copyright infringement or getting sued. If a small artist goes viral and creates a mega-hit off of a cover, that’s when labels take notice and they’ll claim royalties on the song.

Even interpolations or “perceived” interpolations of songs are in danger. One of the latest cases of note involves the song “good 4 u” by Olivia Rodrigo. She lost 50 percent of the at-the-time 2.4 million dollars in revenue to Paramore because the song sounded like the band’s smash single “Misery Business.”

“When labels get the song pulled, it’s disadvantageous to them because they lose out on free money from an artist that’s not even signed to them. Labels will take the money and royalty from you and let you keep the song,” shared Tyler.

For the indie or up-and-coming artist, it’s a potential launching pad to bigger and better things if the right people notice and if the right people cooperate. If the right people notice and don’t cooperate, it could be career-ending.