When releasing a cover version through MusicHub, there are a few things you need to do in order to make sure that:
a) Your work does not create any copyright issues.
b) The original author(s) of the song receive their royalties.
Step 1: Give your track the correct version
When you are setting up your track, make sure to give it the version "Cover Version". This will help to ensure that the royalties for the song and the lyrics (should you choose to include them) will be correctly distributed. You can do this by selecting "Cover Version" from the dropdown menu in the Track Version field:
Step 2: Enter the correct author details
The first thing you need to do is to make sure that you enter the correct author details when setting up the track. Luckily, MusicHub allows you to pull the author information directly from the GEMA database by clicking here:
The system should automatically search for the title you entered for the track, but if not, you can type it in yourself:
You can then simply select the appropriate song, click on 'Import' and the details will be entered automatically: (And don't be surprised if the author details appear as a code, the code will usually be replaced with the composer name(s) after a short time)
If the information is not found automatically you will need to research the songwriter(s) and add the information into these fields yourself.
If you are having trouble finding the songwriter information, you can also try these sites:
Step 3: Buy licenses for Downloads
If you completed the previous step you will have ensured that the songwriter(s) will receive their royalties from any streams that your track receives. However, downloads are treated differently from streams when it comes to royalties payments, especially in North America. In this case, downloads are considered in the same way as physical purchases, which means that they require you to purchase a license before the track is sold. (It is from this license purchase that songwriters receive their royalties from download sales).
How to purchase a license for downloads.
The easiest way to purchase download licenses are from sites like EasySong (https://www.easysong.com) or SongFile (https://www.songfile.com). Simply sign up to one of these sites and purchase a license for how many downloads you expect to sell.
Two things to keep in mind when buying licenses:
It is recommended to be quite conservative in your estimate of how many downloads you expect to sell. You can always purchase more licenses if you need to, so there is no point in buying a license for 1000 downloads and then you end up only selling 25.
Whatever the amount of downloads you decide to buy a license for, it is your responsibility to keep an eye on your sales and to purchase more licenses when that amount of downloads is reached.
But what if you don’t want to buy a download license?
If you don’t want to spend the money on download licenses, there are two options for you:
Option A:
When it comes to choosing which platforms to distribute your release to, you can exclude the services that offer downloads. At the moment, the only two platforms that MusicHub distributes to who offer downloads are i-Tunes (Apple) and Amazon. By not sending your release to these platforms, you will avoid having any download sales. Unfortunately, it is not possible to separate the Apple or Amazon streaming services from their download services, so you can either have both downloads and streaming, or neither.
Option B:
Exclude the North American countries (i.e. The United States and Canada) when it comes to selecting which territories to distribute to. The download licenses apply only to download purchases made in North America so excluding this region will mean that you don’t have to purchase a license. However, this will mean that your music is not available in North America on ANY of the streaming platforms.
