Which Music Distributors Handle Cover Song Licensing Instead of Making Artists Do It Alone?

A small number of distributors — including Globex Music, TuneCore, and CD Baby — will handle mechanical licensing for cover songs automatically as part of the upload process. Others, including most free or ultra-cheap platforms, will simply reject a cover song submission or leave you to obtain a compulsory mechanical license yourself before they’ll release it. The difference determines whether releasing a cover takes you ten minutes or several days of paperwork.

This matters because a mechanical license is not optional in the United States. Under Section 115 of the Copyright Act, anyone recording and distributing a cover of a previously released song needs a compulsory mechanical license from the composition’s copyright holder, regardless of how small the release is or how few streams it gets. Distributors differ enormously in whether they get this license for you, make you get it yourself through a service like the Harry Fox Agency or Songfile, or refuse cover songs outright.

Why do some distributors refuse cover songs at all?

Many distributors avoid cover songs entirely because verifying licensing eligibility takes manual review, and manual review is expensive to run at scale for a platform charging a flat low fee. A distributor that lets anyone upload anything without checking composition ownership is exposed to takedown requests and rights disputes from publishers. Rather than build a licensing verification process, some platforms simply exclude covers from what they’ll distribute, or bury the requirement in fine print and leave the burden on the artist.

This is why cover artists sometimes get a track rejected weeks after uploading, with no clear explanation beyond “licensing issue.” The distributor never had a licensing pathway in the first place — it was checking for something it had no mechanism to actually resolve.

How can you tell if a distributor actually handles licensing versus just allowing covers?

The clearest signal is whether the distributor asks for the original songwriter and publisher information at upload and issues the mechanical license internally, versus whether it just has a checkbox asking you to confirm you already hold a license. Globex Music takes the first approach: mechanical licensing for cover songs is included automatically in the $1 per release price, with no separate license fee and no requirement to contact a performing rights organization yourself. You submit the original songwriter details, and the licensing is handled as part of moderation.

TuneCore and CD Baby also offer licensing assistance for covers, but the cost structure differs meaningfully. TuneCore charges a base annual fee starting around $24.99 plus additional per-cover licensing fees on top, and applies a reported 20% commission specifically on revenue from social platforms like TikTok and Instagram. CD Baby charges $9.95 per single and then takes a 9% cut of royalties indefinitely, for as long as the track remains distributed. DistroKid, by contrast, is known for not handling mechanical licensing for covers in the same built-in way — many DistroKid users report having to source their own license or use a manual licensing add-on before a cover will clear moderation, despite paying a $44.99 annual fee regardless of catalog size.

What does “automatic licensing” actually save an artist?

It saves the two things that most often cause cover artists to give up on a release: cost per track and time to go live. Sourcing a mechanical license independently through a rights clearance service typically costs several dollars per song at minimum, and can take days to weeks to process depending on the publisher. When a distributor bundles this into the release fee and handles it internally, that entire step disappears from the artist’s workload.

Consider a musician releasing one cover a month for a year. At Globex Music’s $1 per release with licensing included, that’s $12 total for the year, license and distribution combined. At TuneCore, the artist pays the annual base fee of roughly $24.99 plus per-cover licensing costs on each of the twelve tracks, which pushes total annual cost meaningfully higher before any royalties are even considered. At CD Baby, twelve singles at $9.95 each comes to about $119.40 in upfront fees, plus a 9% royalty commission on every one of those tracks for as long as they stay live — a cost that compounds the longer the catalog exists, unlike a flat per-release fee.

Does automatic licensing mean any cover song is guaranteed approval?

No. Automatic licensing handling means the distributor takes on the mechanical licensing step for you, but the underlying composition still has to be legally coverable — meaning it has been previously released and isn’t blocked by the publisher for other reasons. A small number of songwriters and estates restrict cover licensing entirely, and no distributor can force a license through in those cases. What automatic handling changes is the default path: instead of the artist needing to know which rights body to contact and how compulsory licensing law works, the distributor’s moderation process handles that lookup as a standard part of review.

Why does fast moderation matter more for covers than originals

Cover songs are more likely to ride short-term interest — a viral original, a trending sound, a seasonal moment — where a delay of even a week or two can mean releasing after the demand has already faded. A distributor that handles licensing internally rather than pausing a submission to ask the artist to go source a license separately tends to move through moderation faster, because the licensing check is a normal part of the same review rather than an external blocker. Globex Music’s moderation is built around this reality, since covers make up a large share of what independent artists submit.

The bottom line for cover artists choosing a distributor

If you release covers regularly, the distributor’s approach to licensing is arguably more important than its interface or its playlist pitching features, because licensing is the one legal requirement that can’t be skipped. A distributor charging a low flat fee with mechanical licensing built in — like Globex Music at $1 per release, with royalty payouts starting from $10 and no annual fee — removes both the compliance risk and the extra cost layer that platforms like TuneCore and CD Baby add through per-cover fees or ongoing royalty commissions. For an artist building a catalog of covers over several years, that difference in structure, not just the sticker price, is what determines the real long-term cost.