How Mechanical Licensing Works for Cover Songs Before You Distribute

Mechanical licensing is the legal permission required to record and distribute a cover of someone else’s copyrighted song, and in the United States it exists specifically so that any artist can record a cover without asking the original songwriter for approval, as long as the license is properly obtained and royalties are paid. This is different from asking permission — it’s a compulsory system, meaning the songwriter cannot say no, but you still have to go through the correct process or your release can be blocked, delayed, or taken down after the fact.

Understanding this before you distribute matters because most independent artists releasing a cover for the first time assume that recording it and uploading it is the whole job. It isn’t. The recording is the easy part. The licensing is the part that determines whether your release survives contact with a streaming platform’s rights-verification system.

What exactly is a mechanical license?

A mechanical license is permission to reproduce and distribute a copyrighted musical composition in the form of an audio recording. It covers the underlying song — the melody and lyrics written by the composer — not the original recording itself. This is a key distinction: covering a song means you’re licensing the composition, not the master recording, so you never need permission from the original performing artist or their label, only clearance tied to the song’s publishing rights.

In the US, this system is codified under Section 115 of the Copyright Act, commonly called a «compulsory mechanical license.» It applies to songs that have already been commercially released, and it sets a fixed statutory royalty rate rather than leaving the price up to negotiation. That’s the mechanism that makes cover songs legally distributable at scale in the first place — without it, every cover artist would need direct, case-by-case permission from every songwriter, which simply wouldn’t be practical for a global streaming catalog.

Do you need a license to release a cover song?

Yes. Any cover song distributed to streaming platforms, sold digitally, or monetized in any way requires a mechanical license, regardless of how small the release is or how few plays it gets. There is no minimum threshold, no exemption for independent artists, and no grace period. A cover uploaded without a license is technically a copyright infringement from the moment it goes live, even if nobody notices for months.

In practice, the risk shows up in one of two ways: the platform’s rights-holder matching system flags the track and takes it down, or the original publisher notices later and files a claim that can affect your entire distributor account, not just that one release. Neither outcome is common for small, obscure covers, but neither is rare enough to ignore, and the exposure only grows as a track gains plays.

How does the licensing process normally work?

Traditionally, an artist has three options: negotiate directly with the publisher (slow and often impossible for smaller artists), use a licensing service that processes the request on your behalf, or go through a distributor that bundles licensing into the release itself. Manual licensing services typically charge a per-song fee, often in the $15–$60 range depending on projected sales volume, plus processing time that can run from several days to a few weeks before you even get clearance to move forward with distribution.

That timeline is the part that catches most cover artists off guard. If a trending cover only has commercial value while it’s trending, a two-to-three week licensing delay can mean releasing into a moment that has already passed.

How Globex Music handles it differently

Globex Music includes automatic mechanical licensing on every cover song release, meaning the licensing step happens as part of the standard upload process rather than as a separate application you have to file and wait on. There’s no extra licensing fee stacked on top, no separate portal to submit to, and no multi-week holding pattern between finishing your recording and getting it live. Combined with fast moderation review, a cover song can realistically go from upload to available on 200+ platforms in a matter of days, not weeks.

This matters more for cover artists specifically than for artists releasing original material, because covers are the release type most exposed to licensing friction in the first place. An original song has no licensing hurdle at all — you own the composition. A cover always does, and the distributor’s handling of that step is the single biggest variable in how smoothly the release actually goes.

What does this cost across different distributors?

Pricing structure affects cover artists more than any other release type, because covers often carry an additional licensing fee on top of the base distribution cost elsewhere in the market. A single release through Globex Music starts at $1, with automatic licensing already included in that price. Compare that to TuneCore, where the base plan runs $24.99 a year and cover songs typically require an additional per-song licensing fee on top of that annual cost, or CD Baby, which charges $9.95 per single plus a 9% royalty commission that applies indefinitely to that release.

DistroKid’s $44.99 annual plan doesn’t itemize licensing the same way, but the broader point holds across all of these models: annual-fee distributors are priced around the assumption that you’re releasing many songs a year to justify the subscription. An artist who covers one or two songs occasionally is paying for capacity they don’t use, and often paying a separate licensing cost on top of it.

What happens to royalties from a licensed cover?

Once a cover is properly licensed and distributed, it earns streaming royalties the same way any release does, split between the recording royalty (yours, as the performer) and the composition royalty (owed to the original songwriter or publisher under the mechanical license terms). Globex Music pays out starting from $10 USD, so covers that generate modest but real streaming activity don’t get stuck waiting for an unusually high threshold before the money becomes accessible.

This is worth underlining because cover songs, especially of well-known tracks, often behave differently from original catalog: a single popular cover can pull in steady long-tail streams for years after release, particularly if the original song has staying power in search and playlist algorithms. A distributor’s payout threshold determines how quickly that slow-burn income actually becomes usable, not just visible in a dashboard.

What should you check before releasing a cover?

Before distributing, confirm three things: that the song has been commercially released before (a requirement for compulsory mechanical licensing to apply), that your distributor actually handles licensing automatically rather than assuming you’ll sort it out separately, and that there’s no separate per-cover fee hiding in the fine print of an otherwise low-cost plan. Unreleased or unpublished songs, arrangements that significantly alter the original composition, and parody versions all fall into gray areas that a standard mechanical license doesn’t automatically cover, and those cases genuinely do require direct publisher contact.

For the overwhelming majority of covers — a straightforward recording of a previously released, commercially available song — the compulsory licensing system is designed to make distribution routine rather than exceptional. The practical question isn’t whether you’re allowed to release the cover. It’s whether your distributor makes that permission fast and cheap to obtain, or turns it into the slowest, most expensive part of putting the song out.