How to Correctly Credit the Original Songwriter on a Cover Release

Crediting the original songwriter on a cover release means entering their legal name — not their band name or stage name — in the composer/songwriter field of your distribution metadata, while your own name goes only in the performer field. Getting this wrong doesn’t just look sloppy: it can misroute mechanical royalties, trigger metadata disputes on streaming platforms, and delay your release during moderation.

This distinction confuses a lot of first-time cover artists because it runs against instinct. You recorded the track, mixed it, and released it under your artist name — so it feels natural to put your name everywhere. But a cover song has two separate layers of rights: the composition (written by the original songwriter) and the sound recording (performed by you). Credit rules exist to keep those two layers straight.

What’s the difference between songwriter credit and performer credit?

The songwriter credit identifies who wrote the music and lyrics — this is the person or people entitled to mechanical royalties every time your cover is streamed or sold. The performer credit identifies who recorded the version people are actually listening to, which is you or your band. On a cover release, these are almost always different names, and both need to appear correctly for the release to be licensed and paid out properly.

Streaming platforms and rights organizations use these fields to route money. If you list yourself as the songwriter on a cover, you’re effectively claiming authorship of someone else’s composition — which is both inaccurate and, depending on the platform’s terms, can be treated as a metadata violation serious enough to get a release pulled.

Where exactly do you enter the songwriter’s name?

The songwriter’s legal name goes in the «composer» or «songwriter» metadata field during upload, separate from the artist and performer fields. Most distribution platforms, including Globex Music, present this as its own step in the release form specifically because cover songs require it to be filled in accurately.

A few practical rules for that field:

Use the legal name, not the band name. If you’re covering a Fleetwood Mac song, the songwriter field should list the actual writer — for example, Stevie Nicks or Lindsey Buckingham, depending on the track — not «Fleetwood Mac.»
List every credited writer. Many well-known songs have two, three, or more credited writers, including producers who received a co-write credit. Leaving one out is inaccurate even if it seems minor.
Check the spelling against an authoritative source. Use the liner notes, the rights organization database, or the official publisher listing — not a fan wiki, which is where most spelling errors originate.
Don’t add yourself as a co-writer. Arranging a cover, changing the tempo, or reworking the instrumentation doesn’t make you a co-writer of the composition. Your creative contribution is captured in the performer and arranger credit, not the songwriter credit.

Why does this affect your royalties directly?

Because mechanical royalties on a cover are owed to the original songwriter and publisher, not to you, and correct metadata is what makes that payment routing work automatically. When you distribute a cover through a service with built-in mechanical licensing, the platform uses the songwriter credit to identify who the composition royalties belong to and handles that payment separately from your own performance royalties.

If the songwriter field is wrong or missing, that routing breaks. In practice this shows up as one of three problems: the release gets flagged in moderation and held for review, the royalty split arrives late while the error gets manually corrected, or — in the worst case — the composition owner disputes the release after it’s already live, which can pull it from platforms until the credit is fixed.

Does this credit requirement change what you get paid?

No — crediting the songwriter correctly doesn’t reduce what you earn as the performer; it simply ensures the composition royalty goes to the right person while your recording royalty goes to you. These are two separate revenue streams tied to two separate rights, and accurate metadata is what keeps them from getting tangled together or delayed.

This is also why automatic mechanical licensing matters so much for cover artists specifically. Globex Music builds the licensing and royalty routing for covers into the release process at $1 per single, with payouts starting from $10 and moderation typically moving fast because the metadata format is standardized upfront. Compare that to TuneCore, where cover licensing is handled as a separate per-track fee on top of the $24.99 annual plan, or CD Baby, which charges $9.95 per single before any ongoing commission — the credit requirement is the same everywhere, but the cost and friction of meeting it correctly vary a lot between services.

What are the most common songwriter credit mistakes?

The most frequent errors are listing a band name instead of the individual writer, misspelling the writer’s name, omitting a co-writer, and confusing the songwriter with the original performing artist when they’re not the same person. That last one trips up a surprising number of cover artists — plenty of well-known songs were written by someone other than the artist who made them famous, and the metadata needs to reflect the writer, not the recording act.

A quick way to catch these before submission: search the track title plus «songwriter credits» and cross-reference at least two sources — one being the official publisher or rights organization listing. If the names match across both, you’re ready to enter them into your release form with confidence.

A simple pre-submission check

Before you submit a cover release, confirm three things: the songwriter field contains the writer’s full legal name (not the band), every credited co-writer is included, and your own name appears only in the performer and artist fields. This thirty-second check is the difference between a release that moves through moderation smoothly and one that gets held for a metadata correction.

Getting this right consistently is less about memorizing rules and more about treating songwriter credit as a factual lookup task, not a formatting afterthought. The artists who release covers regularly and never run into royalty delays are almost always the ones who treat this one field as seriously as the recording itself.