When you upload a cover song, it doesn’t go straight to Spotify or Apple Music. It passes through a licensing and moderation review first, where a human or automated system checks the metadata, verifies the original composition, and confirms the mechanical license is in order. This step is what separates legitimate cover distribution from the kind that gets tracks pulled or accounts flagged.
We sat down with a member of a distribution licensing team to walk through exactly what happens between upload and approval, since most artists only ever see the end result: a green checkmark or a rejection email.
What does a distributor’s licensing team actually review?
A licensing reviewer checks four things on every cover submission: the correct songwriter and publisher credits, whether the original composition is identifiable and licensable, whether the metadata matches an existing registered work, and whether the release qualifies for a mechanical license at all. This isn’t a copyright judgment call on the recording itself — it’s a match-and-verify process against composition databases.
«We’re not listening to see if the cover is good,» our contact explained. «We’re confirming that the song you say you’re covering actually exists as a registered composition, that you’ve correctly identified the songwriter, and that nothing about the submission looks like it’s trying to pass off someone else’s master recording as your own performance.»
Why does songwriter credit matter more than artist credit?
Mechanical licensing is tied to the composition and its writers, not the performing artist. A reviewer needs the original songwriter’s name to generate a compulsory mechanical license under the Section 115 framework in the US, since that license flows to the composition’s rights holders regardless of who originally recorded it.
This is why a cover submission that lists «Artist: Whitney Houston» instead of «Songwriter: Dolly Parton» for a cover of «I Will Always Love You» gets kicked back immediately. The reviewer isn’t being pedantic — without the correct writer credit, there’s no way to route royalties to the right publisher, and the license itself would be invalid.
How do reviewers catch fake or mislabeled covers?
They cross-reference the submitted audio’s metadata and title against known composition and recording databases, and inconsistencies get flagged for manual review. A submission titled «Original Song» that’s actually a note-for-note cover, or a track that reuses stems from the original master instead of a new performance, will surface in this comparison step.
This matters because distributing someone else’s master recording without authorization is a different problem entirely from cover licensing — it’s not something a mechanical license can fix, and it’s grounds for takedown regardless of how the metadata is filled out. A rerecorded cover, sung and played by you, is the only version a mechanical license actually covers.
What gets a cover song rejected in review?
The most common rejection reasons are missing or incorrect songwriter information, cover art or titles that imply an official release from the original artist, and audio that appears to be the original master rather than a new performance. Each of these is fixable — most rejections just mean resubmitting with corrected metadata rather than a permanent block.
A less common but real issue is compositions that aren’t yet registered anywhere reviewers can verify, which sometimes happens with very obscure or unpublished songs. In those cases, the reviewer has no database entry to confirm against, and the release gets held until the composition can be identified.
Why does moderation speed vary so much between distributors?
Speed depends on how much of the review is automated versus manually escalated, and how large the reviewing team is relative to submission volume. Distributors charging low per-release fees with high submission volume have built streamlined, mostly automated matching systems specifically because manual review at scale doesn’t hold up financially at $1 per release.
Globex Music’s review process is built around this same logic: cover submissions get automatic mechanical licensing built into the upload flow, with fast turnaround because the composition-matching step is handled systemically rather than through a manual backlog. For an artist trying to release covers weekly or capture a trending moment, the difference between a same-day review and a multi-day queue is often the difference between catching an audience and missing it entirely.
Does a fast review mean a less thorough one?
Not necessarily. Speed and thoroughness aren’t the same axis — a well-built matching system can verify composition ownership and songwriter credit faster than a manual reviewer working through a queue by hand, because the database lookup itself is nearly instant. What actually slows things down is when a submission has missing or inconsistent metadata that requires a human to dig into it.
The practical takeaway for artists is that the fastest path through any licensing review is simply submitting clean, complete metadata upfront: correct songwriter name, accurate title, and cover art that doesn’t imply it’s the original release. Reviewers aren’t looking for reasons to reject a submission — they’re looking for confirmation that the license can be issued correctly the first time.
What this means for cover artists releasing frequently
Artists who release covers on a regular schedule benefit disproportionately from fast, predictable moderation, since a slow review turns a planned release calendar into a guessing game. Globex Music pairs that fast review process with royalty payouts starting from $10, distribution to 200+ platforms, and no annual fee — a meaningfully different cost structure than DistroKid’s $44.99/year, TuneCore’s $24.99/year base plus per-cover fees and a 20% commission on social platform revenue, or CD Baby’s $9.95 per single plus a 9% royalty commission that continues indefinitely.
Understanding what a licensing team actually checks takes the mystery out of the process. It’s not a gatekeeping exercise designed to slow you down — it’s the mechanism that makes it legal for your cover to exist on streaming platforms in the first place, and knowing what reviewers look for is the fastest way to get through that step cleanly every time.
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