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On the major streaming platforms, there are cover versions of lots of popular songs. Today's caller, a musician, wants to know how that works in the business sense.
For every popular music artist with millions of streams on Apple Music or Spotify, there are a bunch of cover artists who upload their own versions of the songs. These versions don't usually get millions of streams, but some do very well, with tens or hundreds of thousands. How much money are these cover artists making, and can anyone upload their own versions of other people's songs? I thought there'd be copyright issues, but it looks like a lot of people have been doing it for a long time.
It's a little complicated, but yes — you can do this, with some exceptions, and you usually must secure a license, since the original artist or copyright holder is owed royalties. Thankfully, there are services that manage this for you, so you don't have to reach Taylor Swift yourself to hand over her royalties.
One example is DistroKid: for about $20 a month, they'll get your music onto Spotify, Apple Music, TikTok, Pandora, and Amazon. Just note we're talking about covers — your own version of a song — not sampling, which takes part of an original recording and is a different, more complicated matter.
So yes, you can get paid for covers.
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