Legality of doing cover songs?

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ApolloSpeed

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Oct 31, 2005
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My band is considering doing an 80's cover song on our next album.......

just wondering what are the laws or whatever on doing that?

We are not a signed band yet or anything, but we are looking into getting into a national managment company right now........but just wondering if we will run into royalties or if I should apply for some sorta paperwork to make everything cool.:kickass: :saint:
 
www.harryfox.com/

It will be about $100 for distro of 1000 units for most music.

Just keep in mind, you must pay for digital distro too if you go that route. Posting on myspace without a license will get in some trouble. Usually a cease a desist notice.
 
When my band used a clip from Bill Hicks to open up our 1st album, we contacted the management for his estate (he passed away years ago), and they said that like $1 for every CD sold is what they would charge us in royalties. They said that was the case if we charged money for our cd's. So..if we gave the cd's away, they didn't want any royalties, however, credit for the material on the cd booklet was required no matter which route we went (give-away or sell).

That was just our case, it could be different for actual songs, since the entire track is a composition of someone else's. We only used like a 6 second snippet on one song as the intro...

~e.a
 
no, you simply need to get a clearance form and mechanical license from the Harry Fox Agency and you can use any song... you will pay only the mechanical royalty, it's just that publishing must be credited properly and all publishing earnings from your version of the tune will go to the original publishing company (usually owned by the artist), and not yours. Royalties (of which there are two types) are different and separate from publishing income.
 
I think it's gay to pay even $1 of a band's hard earnings when each band member probably makes less than a $1 from the sale of each CD. That's just totally greedy and the people who demand these royalties didn't even have to do any work on the CD to make more money than all the other members who toiled away in a studio for a month!

Sure they may have worked on the song 20 years ago but then again they probably made a ton of cash off of it back then... it's just greed, man. I wanted to include a cover on my band's next CD but I guess it won't happen? You know you could pull a WEIRD AL and just write different lyrics, call it a parody, won't have to pay anything, just will have to get permission from the band. ^_^
 
I think it usually averages to 10 cents per CD. I would assume that this money goes to whoever owns the publishing rights. (I think) in most cases, the money goes directly to the artist and not filtered through the label first.

I'm all for the artist making money off their songwriting. Some the best covers were from bands that were hardly millionaires.

Anacrusis - I love the world
Forbidden - 21st Century Schizoid Man
Overkill - Frankenstein
Confessor - The Last Judgement
Wrathchild America - I Ain't Drunk, I'm Just Drinkin'
 
Oinkness said:
I think it's gay to pay even $1 of a band's hard earnings when each band member probably makes less than a $1 from the sale of each CD. That's just totally greedy and the people who demand these royalties didn't even have to do any work on the CD to make more money than all the other members who toiled away in a studio for a month!

Sure they may have worked on the song 20 years ago but then again they probably made a ton of cash off of it back then... it's just greed, man. I wanted to include a cover on my band's next CD but I guess it won't happen? You know you could pull a WEIRD AL and just write different lyrics, call it a parody, won't have to pay anything, just will have to get permission from the band. ^_^
Click to expand...
it's not $1 per cd, much less. it is not greed. by your logic i should just cover "Hey Jude" and keep all the money myself...shit, i can just not write anything.. just do whole albums of Beatles covers and keep the money all myself!!! wrong. this is not the way it works, and unless you live in a communist country it never will be. and weird al does indeed pay.
 
Damn I'm stupid. Thanks for the double big-name pwn. I seemed to get pwned by big-names in metal a LOT. :lol:

I'd love to hear a James Murphy cover of Hey Jude though.....
 
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