Cover Song Royalties: Who Actually Gets Paid

Someone in a comment section will tell you that a cover is free money, and someone else will tell you that you need permission from the writer. Both are wrong. Cover song royalties split along a line that most explanations blur: you own the recording you made, and you own none of the song you recorded. The per-stream money your distributor collects is yours. Every publishing dollar the release generates, mechanical and performance alike, belongs to the people who wrote the original.

That division is not negotiable and it is not a matter of who works harder. It follows from the fact that a released track is two separate copyrights stacked on top of each other, and a cover only ever gives you one of them.

The two copyrights, and which one you just made

Every song on a streaming service carries a composition and a sound recording. The composition is the melody and the lyrics. The sound recording is one fixed performance of it. Our explainer on the P line and the C line walks through the two ownership marks that sit on a release for exactly this reason.

When you record a cover you create a new sound recording. You paid for the session, so you own that master, and the streaming income attached to it flows to you through your distributor like any other release.

You did not create a new composition. The composition already existed, and it stays exactly where it was. So the mechanical royalty generated by every stream, and the performance royalty generated every time your version plays on radio or in a venue, route to the original writer and their publisher. This is why publisher and writer shares matter here: on a cover, both of those shares are somebody else's.

The compulsory license, and the sentence inside it that costs you

United States law is generous to cover artists in one specific way. Section 115 of the Copyright Act creates a compulsory license: once recordings of a nondramatic musical work have been distributed to the public in the United States with the copyright owner's authority, you can record and distribute your own version without asking anyone. The writer cannot refuse you. That is genuinely unusual, and it is why cover culture exists at the scale it does.

The same section then takes something back. Section 115(a)(2) reads:

A compulsory license includes the privilege of making a musical arrangement of the work to the extent necessary to conform it to the style or manner of interpretation of the performance involved, but the arrangement shall not change the basic melody or fundamental character of the work, and shall not be subject to protection as a derivative work under this title, except with the express consent of the copyright owner.

Read the last clause twice, because it is the part that decides your income. Your arrangement is not protected as a new work. You can move a song from stadium rock to bedroom folk, rewrite the chords, halve the tempo, and none of it makes you a writer of anything. Absent written consent from the copyright owner, an arrangement earns a zero percent writer share.

We say this to artists more often than any other single thing about covers, and it is worth being blunt: the belief that a distinctive arrangement earns a slice of the publishing is the most expensive myth in independent music. It costs people years of registrations that were never going to pay, and it occasionally costs them a relationship with a publisher they annoyed.

Do you actually need a license to put a cover on Spotify?

Here the law and your distributor give different answers, and you have to satisfy both.

The law first. The Music Modernization Act created a blanket mechanical license for interactive streaming services. The Copyright Office states plainly that it no longer accepts song-by-song notices of intention for digital phonorecord deliveries, whether a permanent download, a limited download or an interactive stream, and that those deliveries are now licensed on a blanket basis through The MLC. Song-by-song notices survive only for non-digital uses such as CDs and vinyl.

The practical consequence: Spotify is the licensee, not you. Spotify reports your cover's usage to The MLC and pays the mechanical, and The MLC passes it to the original writer's publisher. Nobody sends you a bill.

Your distributor is a different story. DistroKid requires that you buy a cover license through its own service every time you upload a cover, secured through the Harry Fox Agency, even if you already bought one somewhere else. It charges one dollar a month per cover song, billed as twelve dollars a year, and it warns that securing the license can take up to fourteen business days. Plan your release date around that window rather than discovering it the week of.

DistroKid also warns that its cover licenses apply only to releases it distributes, and that a release containing a cover will not be available for sale in India, Pakistan, Mexico or Canada, though it does stream in those countries. If a chunk of your audience is in one of those four markets, that is worth knowing before release day rather than after.

Whether the fee is fair given the blanket license already sitting underneath the stream is a reasonable argument to have. What is not up for argument is that your release does not go live until you pay it, so budget for it.

The 2026 rate, and a number worth checking on your own statement

For physical copies and permanent downloads, the rate is set by law rather than by negotiation. The Copyright Royalty Judges publish a cost of living adjustment each year, and the 2026 final rule sets it at 13.1 cents per work, or 2.52 cents per minute of playing time, whichever amount is larger, for every physical phonorecord and permanent download. That is up from 12.7 cents in 2025.

One detail worth knowing if you release covers through DistroKid: its own help page still describes the deduction as 12.7 cents per song sold in the US, which was last year's figure. It is a small gap and it only touches download and physical sales rather than streams, but it is the kind of thing to check against your statements rather than assume.

Streaming works differently. There is no per-copy rate for an interactive stream; the mechanical comes out of a percentage-of-revenue formula, which our piece on what a mechanical royalty is breaks down. The destination is the same either way. The original writer gets it.

The mistake we see most often

Do not register your cover at The MLC or your performing rights organization as a work you wrote.

It is an easy mistake to make, because the registration form does not know the difference and will accept whatever you type. What happens next is not income. You have claimed a share of a composition owned by somebody else, so your entry lands as a conflicting claim against the real publisher. Conflicts freeze money rather than release it, and they hold up the original writer's payments alongside your own registrations. Our guide to registering a song covers what does belong in a filing.

This leads somewhere awkward for a company that sells publishing administration, so we will say it directly: a cover is the one release type where a publishing administrator earns you nothing. There is no publisher share for us to collect, because you do not hold one. Anyone who tells you they will collect the publishing on your covers is either confused about the difference between the master and the song, or counting on you being confused. We tell artists this before they sign. Our pricing is commission-only, so if there is nothing to collect, there is nothing to charge.

Covers still earn. They earn on the master, and for a lot of independent artists that is a real and sensible income stream. Just do not build a registration strategy on top of a share you do not have.

Covers this route does not reach

The compulsory license is narrower than most people assume. It applies to an audio-only recording of a song already distributed to the public in the US with the owner's authority. Outside that, you need a direct negotiated license, which the writer is free to refuse:

• Tracks that sample the original recording. Playing a song yourself is a cover. Lifting the master is a sample, and it needs clearance from the recording owner as well as the publisher.
• Remixes. A remix works from someone else's recording, so it needs their permission.
• Translated lyrics. A translation is a derivative work, and the compulsory license does not extend to it.
• Medleys and mashups. Both alter the fundamental character of the works involved.
• Songs never commercially released. The license only opens once the owner has put recordings of the song out to the public. A leaked demo does not count, and neither does a song you heard live.
• Anything set to picture. Video is a synchronization right, which Section 115 does not grant at all. Your audio cover being cleared on Spotify tells you nothing about the same performance on YouTube.

Public domain songs sit outside this entirely. No license is required, and no mechanical is owed, because there is no longer a copyright owner to pay.

Before you release

1. Confirm the original was commercially released in the US. If you cannot find it on a store or service, the compulsory license may not be open to you.
2. Confirm your version qualifies. No samples, no translated lyrics, no fundamental rewrite of the melody.
3. Buy the license your distributor requires, and start early enough to absorb a two-week turnaround.
4. Mark the release as a cover in your distributor's metadata, and credit the original writers accurately. Getting the writer names right helps the money reach them, which is the entire point of the system.
5. Leave the composition registrations alone. File your own songs at The MLC and your PRO; leave the covers off both.
6. Watch the master side instead. That is where your money is, and it behaves like any other release.

A cover is a promotional and revenue decision about a recording, not a publishing one. Treated that way it is a perfectly good move. Treated as a shortcut into somebody else's publishing, it is a slow way to accumulate registrations that pay nothing and irritate people. If you are trying to work out where your publishing income actually is, the unclaimed royalties piece is the better place to start, because it deals with songs you genuinely wrote.