Cover song licensing: mechanicals, distributor services, YouTube covers and translations

Covers are the friendliest corner of music copyright. Unlike a sample, where the owners can name any price or say no, a straight cover of a released song has a legal route that does not need anyone's yes. But that route is narrower than most people assume, and it stops at the edge of YouTube and at the first translated line.

This is a practical guide, not legal advice. The law below is American, because that is where the compulsory licence lives and where most distributor cover services operate; other countries license covers through their own collecting societies. Everything is as we read it on 24 Oct 2026.

What you are licensing (and what you are not)

A cover is a new recording of an existing song. You make the recording, so you own that master. What you are borrowing is the composition: the melody and lyrics written by someone else.

The Copyright Office's Circular 73 is blunt about the split: section 115 "does not cover sound recordings. Rather, it covers the reproduction and distribution of nondramatic musical compositions." If you use any part of the original record, a backing track ripped from it or a stem, you are no longer doing a cover; you are sampling, and our sample clearance guide applies instead.

The compulsory (mechanical) licence

Under 17 U.S.C. § 115, anyone can get a compulsory licence to make and distribute recordings of a song once recordings of it "have previously been distributed to the public in the United States" under the copyright owner's authority. In plain terms: once a song is out, you can record your own version without asking, provided you follow the rules and pay the set rate.

Circular 73 lists what the licence lets you do and what it does not. You may:

• make and distribute recordings of the song, where the main purpose is distribution to the public for private use;
• make an arrangement "to the extent necessary to conform it to the style or manner of interpretation of the performance involved".

You need the owner's permission to:

• change the basic melody or fundamental character of the work;
• claim copyright in your arrangement as a derivative work;
• make recordings meant for background music, jukeboxes, broadcasting or other public use.

The Office also points out that the licence is a fallback. You can always negotiate directly with the publisher; the compulsory route exists for when they won't negotiate or can't be reached.

Physical vs digital: two different machines

Since the Music Modernization Act, the US splits this in two. The Copyright Office's MMA FAQ says it no longer accepts notices of intention for digital deliveries, "such as in the form of a permanent download, limited download, or interactive stream". Those now run under a blanket licence that digital services take out and pay through the MLC. The old notice system "will remain in place for non-digital uses (e.g. CDs, vinyl)".

For physical copies, § 115 requires you to serve a notice of intention on the owner "before, or not later than 30 calendar days after, making, and before distributing" any copies. Miss it and the statute says the failure "forecloses the possibility of a compulsory license", which leaves the copies open to an infringement claim. Circular 73 adds that you then owe monthly royalty payments and statements to a known owner.

The rate

For physical copies and permanent downloads, the rate is set by the Copyright Royalty Board and rises with inflation. Hypebot reported that the 2026 rate is 13.1 cents per song, up from 12.7 cents in 2025. Check the current figure before you press anything; it moves every year. If you want the full picture of who collects mechanicals on the songwriting side, our mechanical royalties and the MLC explainer covers it.

Distributor cover-licensing services

Most independent artists never file a notice themselves. They tick a box at upload and let the distributor handle it.

DistroKid's cover licensing page is a clear example of how these work. It defines a cover as "any song that you perform and record yourself using music originally released by someone else", charges $12 a year per cover song, deducts the mechanical fee from your sales and sends it to the Harry Fox Agency, which passes it to the songwriter. It also says you must opt in to its licence even if you already hold one, because otherwise it has "no way to verify" the songwriter is paid, and that skipping it could get the track pulled from streaming services. (The page quotes "12.7¢ per song sold in the U.S.", which is the 2025 rate, a small sign of how these pages lag the CRB.)

Two things to take from that:

1. It is a subscription. A per-year fee is fine for a handful of covers. For a back catalogue of fifty, it adds up every year whether the tracks earn or not, so work out which covers actually pay for themselves.
2. Its scope is the compulsory licence's scope. A distributor service clears a straight cover. It cannot grant rights the statute does not give, so anything that changes the song's character, a medley built from several songs, a rewritten lyric, a translation, is outside it, whatever the upload form lets you tick.

Other distributors offer different arrangements, from bundled cover licensing to asking you to bring your own licence. Read the current terms of yours on the day you upload.

YouTube covers are a different deal

A mechanical licence covers audio recordings. A video is not one: Circular 73 notes that a phonorecord "does not include sounds accompanying a motion picture or other audiovisual work". So your distributor's cover licence does not cover your YouTube cover video.

YouTube handles this through Content ID instead. Its help page on monetising cover videos says creators in the YouTube Partner Program can share revenue from eligible covers once the music publishers claim them through Content ID, and that you'll be "paid revenue for these videos on a pro rata basis". The broader monetisation guidance puts the condition sharply: the publisher "must claim the song through the Content ID system and elect to monetize it". If they don't, you can't monetise the cover without explicit written permission, and commercial recordings such as karaoke or instrumental versions aren't eligible.

So on YouTube the publisher decides, video by video. A claim that shares revenue is the good outcome. For how claims and disputes work in general, see our Content ID guide.

Translations: the line the easy route does not cross

Singing a song in another language feels like the purest kind of cover. Legally it is not. The definition of "derivative work" in 17 U.S.C. § 101 begins with "a translation, musical arrangement" as examples. The compulsory licence allows only the arrangement needed to fit your style, and not one that changes the work's "fundamental character". A new lyric in a new language is a rewrite of half the song, and in our reading it falls outside that allowance.

In practice: if you want to release a translated cover, ask the publisher for permission first and get it in writing. Expect them to care about who wrote the translation and whether its lyricist gets credit or a share, because the translation becomes a new version of their song. The same goes for parody lyrics, gender-swapped lyrics and anything else where you are changing the words rather than the delivery.

A cover checklist

1. Confirm the song has been released in the US with the owner's authority. If it hasn't, there is no compulsory licence.
2. Record everything yourself. No pieces of the original master.
3. Keep your arrangement an arrangement. Restyling is fine; new melody or new lyrics need permission.
4. For streaming and downloads, use your distributor's cover service or confirm how your distributor wants covers flagged.
5. For CDs and vinyl, serve a notice of intention on time and pay the set rate, or license through an agency.
6. For YouTube, assume the publisher controls monetisation.
7. For translations, medleys and lyric changes, go to the publisher directly.

What we think

The compulsory licence is one of the better deals in copyright: it guarantees artists the right to interpret each other's songs and guarantees songwriters get paid when they do. The problem is everything bolted on around it. A per-year distributor fee that outlives most covers' earnings, a separate regime for video where the publisher decides case by case, and rate figures on product pages that are a year out of date all push the cost and the confusion onto the artist with the least leverage.

The translation gap bothers us most. Translated covers are how songs travel between scenes and languages, and they are often made by exactly the independent, multilingual artists that streaming says it wants to serve. Yet there is no standard licence for them, only a request to a publisher who may never reply. A simple, opt-in translation licence, with a fixed share for the translator, would do more for cross-border music than another discovery feature. Until someone builds it, ask first, keep the email, and don't let an upload checkbox tell you a translation is "just a cover".