Covers clutter online music sites, help emerging artists find fame

LOS ANGELES – There are about 600 versions of Adele’s Oscar-winning song “Skyfall” on the Spotify subscription music service. Not one of them features Adele.

Adele’s label, XL Recordings, keeps her music off of all-you-can-listen subscription plans until download sales peter out. In the meantime, copycat artists fill the void, racking up royalty revenue, often before customers realize they’ve been listening to someone else.

Alice Bonde Nissen found that out the hard way. She once paid $17 a month for Spotify’s premium service in Denmark. Nissen found a version of “Skyfall” and mistakenly clicked on a “follow” button to become a fan of GMPresents and Jocelyn Scofield, the name for a cover-song specialist with some 4,600 Spotify followers. Scofield, who didn’t respond to a message seeking comment for this story, has the most listened-to cover of “Skyfall” on the service.

“When I found out … that I couldn’t find the original ‘Skyfall’ (and some other hits) I decided to quit Spotify,” Nissen said.

Thousands of cover songs crowd digital music services such as Spotify and Rhapsody, and listeners are getting annoyed. The phenomenon threatens the growth of these services – which have millions of paying subscribers – and could hold back the tepid recovery of a music industry still reeling from the decline of the CD.

Streaming services put a world of music at listeners’ fingertips with millions of tracks, everything from the latest pop hits to age-old violin concertos. For a flat fee – usually about $10 a month in the U.S. – users can listen to as many songs as they wish. The music resides on the provider’s servers and gets transmitted, or streamed, to subscribers as they listen on smartphones, tablet computers and PCs.

The services allow users to store songs on their devices as long as they keep paying. But because such a vast selection can be stored online in the so-called cloud, when listeners search for popular songs, they often find oddball renditions.

Cover songs are perfectly legal in the U.S. and have a long tradition in the music industry. Some covers are even more famous than the originals. Which do you think of first, Aretha Franklin’s soaring 1967 version of “Respect,” or Otis Redding’s original from two years earlier? How about Jimi Hendrix’s funky 1968 rendition of “All Along the Watchtower”? Does anyone even remember that Bob Dylan wrote and sang it in a release six months before?

The difference today is that anyone with a computer, a microphone and an Internet connection can create and distribute a cover. New technology, from affordable digital recording equipment and sound-mixing programs to convenient online services are making homemade covers an easy and profitable endeavor. And sing-it-yourself shows such as “American Idol,” “The Voice” and “The X Factor” are fueling the notion that anyone with a decent voice can be a star.

Spotify’s head of development and analysis, Sachin Doshi, acknowledges that finding covers instead of originals can be frustrating. “We recognize it’s a problem we haven’t fully solved yet,” Doshi says.

Some independent artists insist cover songs are a fast way to achieve fame. Kina Grannis says covers are helping her build a fan base. The 27-year-old Los Angeles-based singer won the 2008 Doritos Crash the Super Bowl contest. As part of the competition, fans were asked to vote for an aspiring musician’s music video. The winner got to air their creation before 100 million viewers on game day. Grannis says she wouldn’t have earned enough votes to win if she hadn’t seeded her YouTube channel every day with covers of artists like Jason Mraz and Death Cab for Cutie. Many of her current followers on YouTube stumbled upon her while searching for originals.

“It doesn’t feel bad that they were looking for someone else, because they didn’t even know I existed,” says Grannis, whose original song video “In Your Arms,” has racked up 9.2 million views. “They’re not going to search for Kina Grannis if they’ve never heard of you.”

U.S. copyright law says cover artists don’t require the original artist’s permission, as long as they get a license, pay royalties and let the original songwriters release their version first. Streaming services like Spotify are obligated by law to handle songwriting royalties on behalf of cover artists.

Obtaining a license to record a cover is easy and inexpensive. Services like Google Inc.’s Limelight, which launched in late 2009, offer commercial song licenses to anyone who fills out a form. For each song they cover, artists pay a $15 fee. By law, Limelight also charges $9.10 in advance for every 100 downloads the artists may sell. TuneCore, which launched in 2006, distributes songs on outlets like iTunes for $10 per track. Selling a couple hundred tracks – because of consumer confusion or otherwise – can earn cover artists enough money to pay the bills.

The hurdle is so low for the average amateur that once a hit song comes out, it’s covered quickly. Take “Suit & Tie,” a Justin Timberlake song released by RCA Records in January. There are already around 180 covers on Spotify in addition to Timberlake’s version.

Since Adele’s “Skyfall” was released in October, it has sold more than 1.9 million copies in the U.S. Cover artists sold more than 54,000 copies, according to Nielsen SoundScan. The top-selling cover was produced by Movie Sounds Unlimited, a subsidiary of German music publisher BMG, and sold over 9,800 units.

While some people make covers to get discovered, others seem to be in it to trick buyers and make a fast buck. A recent search for popular artists on Spotify reveals plenty of me-too bands who pick deceptive artist names like the “Bruno Mars Tributors” or song names like “Firework (As Made Famous By Katy Perry).” The artwork and graphics used for their songs are sometimes a mirror image of the originals.

The producer behind that Katy Perry cover says he’s not out to deceive.

“It’s not about trying to live in somebody’s shadow or faking people out,” says Michael Vail Blum, the Sherman Oaks, Calif.-based owner of Titan Music Inc. Blum says the cover song business is about taking great material – sometimes written by someone else – and making a great recording. Technology has just evened the playing field for artists who aren’t signed to major labels, he says.