Freesound Forums

Does anyone know how to go about getting permission to cover a song, attribute credit, copyright etc.?

Thanks!

I think you have to contact the label / band management

This is from my experience and understanding from 25 years in the business--but I'm not a lawyer.

One can "cover" anything live. Venues and radio stations pay blanket licenses to ASCAP, BMI, etc. to cover what music is played in their house.

One can "cover" anything as a recording, but if you are making a commercial recording, you need a license, which is covered by a compulsory rate of 9.1¢ per sale on most recordings. Just google music license for commercial recordings--there are companies that handle this.

If you are doing a non-commercial recording on a platform like youtube video, there seems to be grey area--the algorithmic copyright systems may not allow you to monetize a video, with ad revenue automatically going to the copyright holder, but they don't take videos down anymore.

Facebook's algorithm is terrible, especially if you do any classical or piano music, because it "has a terrible ear" (meaning it can't differentiate between a commercial recording and live performances very well), it heavily favors the whims of the big record companies, and mutes the audio whether the claim is legit or not. They recently muted an original piece I wrote that was part of a virtual church service, and basically ruined the live stream for an entire congregation, because it falsely linked my piano and string piece to a classical recording owned by Sony.

If you are talking about creating a written arrangement, you need to get permission from the publisher (e.g. when I was arranging for a major ensemble, I wrote Paul McCartney's publisher to get permission to arrange a tune. There was a small (like $35 dollar) fee, a requirement to print a certain copyright notice on each page of the arrangement, and I was restricted to how many copies I was allowed to make. I was not given permission to sell the arrangement. We also recorded it on an album, so we were required to pay the compulsory rate mentioned above for each sale of the track. There are also options now for this kind of publishing through SMP Press that weren't available back then, but I haven't tried it yet.

skwee_geo wrote:
This is from my experience and understanding from 25 years in the business--but I'm not a lawyer.

One can "cover" anything live. Venues and radio stations pay blanket licenses to ASCAP, BMI, etc. to cover what music is played in their house.

One can "cover" anything as a recording, but if you are making a commercial recording, you need a license, which is covered by a compulsory rate of 9.1¢ per sale on most recordings. Just google music license for commercial recordings--there are companies that handle this.

If you are doing a non-commercial recording on a platform like youtube video, there seems to be grey area--the algorithmic copyright systems may not allow you to monetize a video, with ad revenue automatically going to the copyright holder, but they don't take videos down anymore.

Facebook's algorithm is terrible, especially if you do any classical or piano music, because it "has a terrible ear" (meaning it can't differentiate between a commercial recording and live performances very well), it heavily favors the whims of the big record companies, and mutes the audio whether the claim is legit or not. They recently muted an original piece I wrote that was part of a virtual church service, and basically ruined the live stream for an entire congregation, because it falsely linked my piano and string piece to a classical recording owned by Sony.

If you are talking about creating a written arrangement, you need to get permission from the publisher (e.g. when I was arranging for a major ensemble, I wrote Paul McCartney's publisher to get permission to arrange a tune. There was a small (like $35 dollar) fee, a requirement to print a certain copyright notice on each page of the arrangement, and I was restricted to how many copies I was allowed to make. I was not given permission to sell the arrangement. We also recorded it on an album, so we were required to pay the compulsory rate mentioned above for each sale of the track. There are also options now for this kind of publishing through SMP Press that weren't available back then, but I haven't tried it yet.

go to the studio . there you will find everything ...

lunaliina420 wrote:
go to the studio . there you will find everything ...