Sound-alike copycat recordings are sometimes used to accompany sports routines.
We explain what you need to look out for, and why, when considering using them.
Lets start with a quick refresher on music copyright ownership.
Music, or any copyrightable work, is owned by its creators - and therefore permission is needed from all of the owners before you can use it. In the case of recorded music, there are two 'sides' to this creation process and ownership.
The recording artist, along with the producer and musicians involved, creates a specific performance / interpretation of a song - the recording of this is protected by copyright law.
However, the song that is recorded, i.e. its lyrics and melody, is its own separate entity capable of being performed / interpreted in different ways, and also separately protected by copyright law.
Knowing this, we can start to understand the motivations of the master recording and music publishing owners.
If you owned the master recording to a successful song, you obviously wouldn't want any inferior imitations of your song, ones that are NOT owned by you and would detract from the money you could earn from streaming royalties of you song and confuse people's association of your recording of the song, to get out into the market.
If you are a music pubisher, you have similar motivations, whereby you want the popular recording of your song to be as big a hit as possible, but you also would want other people to do different versions of your song that could also become hits.
In fact, the following iconic songs were originally written and released by different artists and it was a cover version of each that went on to become monster worldwide hits.
Pop Quiz - can you name the original recording artists and writers of these four worldwide smash hits that are all cover versions? Answers at the end of the blog...
The publishing owners of these songs were no doubt delighted with the success of the covers!
The owners of the master recordings of the originals can also have no complaints - the cover versions of the songs were all different interpretations that better captured the public's imagination than the original and deservedly found success.
But what about sound-alike copycat recordings, that are deliberately recorded to resemble the original recording?
In recent years, Taylor Swift has released what are essentially sound-alike cover versions of her OWN albums - we discussed the specific reasons for this in an earlier blog
That, though, is a rare (possibly unique) example of positive motivations for releasing sound-alike cover versions (although if you were the owner of Taylor's original recordings of the albums, you probably wouldn't feel it was such a positive thing...)
Its very easy to access a big audience via streaming these days, and record labels are
constantly on alert for copycat sound-alikes being released to try and fool listeners into streaming the sound-alike in order to gain the royalties instead of the genuine version - a recent blog of ours highlighted how Universal Music is suing another record label Believe for $500M for tempo-shifting and producing slight remixes of its songs
In addition, its very common for such sound-alikes to have very similar sounding or slightly mis-spelled either song titles or artist names. In legal terms this could be described as both "passing off" and "bait and switch", where someone is trying to make money by claiming what they are offering is genuine, when in fact it is not.
Sound-alike cover versions are also made available by various companies for use in sporting routines.
The motivations for producing this music is ostensibly to make available songs that are difficult to license from the original copyright owners. In reality this means they are opportunistically creating covers and licensing those cover versions, which denies the original artists either the opportunity to monetise that use, or to refuse the use (some artists have strong opinions about how they want - or do not want- their music to be used, which is their moral and legal right as creators).
Suppliers of sound-alike recordings for sports also often use the names of the original artists when selling these songs, thereby "passing off" and committing a "bait and switch". What's worse, they will often use images of the artists or official cover art, which is the property of the artist / their record label, without permission.
It gets even worse if you are an owner of the publishing rights of such songs. The vast majority of cover versions for use in sports do NOT offer any rights from the music publishing owners of the songs they have recorded. This is key, because you will be performing a routine to the song, and also potentially mixing the recording with other songs, which are respectively within the scope of a Grand Right and a Derivative Work, both rights which are closely guarded by songwriters.
If you license one of these sound-alike cover versions, you are very likely buying yourself a copyright infringement problem.
What you can look out for:
Look at the 'small print' of the license agreement (if any - if they don't list the rights you are being granted in detail in a license agreement, don't use that company).
Sound-alike recordings that provide a license but infringe music publishing rights, for which you (as well as the supplier of the song) can be sued, will:
not mention publishing rights at all;
or restrict the scope of the license to the "recording / master only";
some go as far as to say that you cannot edit or use the song in a mix (derivative work) without the permission of the music publishing owners, which you have to get yourself;
pretty much all of them conveniently omit any mention of the key right you need to use the music to accompany your routine.
And the use of ALL sound-alike recordings are denying the rights of the original recording artist and typically use the artists name, song title and cover art / images of the artist without permission ("passing off" and "bait and switch"), meaning that they are infringing the recording artist's / record label rights.
The easiest way to be safe? License and download official music industry tracks from ClicknClear's extensive pre-cleared catalog, which are guaranteed to come with all rights you need from both the recording artists and 100% of the owners of the music publishing / songwriting copyrights.
COVER MUSIC ANSWERS
Mickey was originally recorded in 1979 by pop group Racey (about a girl named Kitty).
Girls Just Wanna Have Fun was originally recorded by 80’s new wave musician Robert Hazard.
I Love Rock n Roll was originally recorded by rock group The Arrows in 1975.
I Will Always Love You was originally recorded by country music legend Dolly Parton in 1974.