Cover Songs and the Music Modernization Act: What Changed in 2021 (And What It Means Now)

The Music Modernization Act (MMA), signed into law in 2018 with its blanket licensing provisions taking effect in January 2021, changed who administers mechanical royalties for interactive streaming in the United States. It did not change whether you need a license to release a cover song. That distinction confuses a lot of independent artists, and it’s worth untangling because the practical impact on someone releasing a cover in 2026 is different from what most summaries suggest.

What was the Music Modernization Act, in plain terms?

The MMA is a US federal law that restructured how mechanical royalties get collected and paid for songs streamed on interactive services like Spotify and Apple Music. Before 2021, streaming platforms had to track down and pay individual songwriters or publishers directly for mechanical royalties, a process riddled with errors and lawsuits over unpaid or misallocated royalties. The MMA created the Mechanical Licensing Collective (MLC), a single organization now responsible for collecting mechanical royalties from streaming services and paying them out to the correct songwriters and publishers.

This matters for cover songs specifically because mechanical royalties are exactly what a cover artist owes the original songwriter every time their version gets streamed or downloaded. The MMA didn’t create that obligation — US copyright law has required a mechanical license for cover recordings since 1909. What the MMA did was fix the plumbing on the collection side for streaming, not the underlying rule that you need permission to record someone else’s song.

Did the MMA make it legal to release covers without a license?

No. This is the most common misreading of the law. The MMA’s blanket license provision applies to streaming platforms and digital service providers, giving them a mechanism to license millions of songs at once through the MLC rather than negotiating individually. It does not extend any new right to the artist recording the cover. If you record and release a cover song, you still need your own mechanical license — either a compulsory license under Section 115 of the Copyright Act or a direct license from the publisher — before that track goes out to any platform.

What actually changed for independent cover artists after 2021?

The real-world change was administrative rather than legal. Before the MLC existed, royalty collection for mechanical rights on streaming was inconsistent, and songwriters routinely went unpaid because no single entity was responsible for matching streams to the correct rights holder. After January 2021, the MLC took over that matching and payment function for US mechanical royalties on interactive streaming, which means original songwriters are now more likely to actually receive what they’re owed when your cover of their song streams.

For the artist releasing the cover, this shows up indirectly: distributors and licensing services built their compulsory licensing workflows around the same Section 115 framework the MLC now administers more efficiently. That’s part of why automatic mechanical licensing on a cover song release works as smoothly as it does today — the back-end infrastructure for tracking and paying songwriters is more reliable than it was before 2021, even though the front-end requirement (get a license before you release) hasn’t moved.

Does the MMA affect cover songs on YouTube or TikTok?

Not directly. The MMA’s blanket license and the MLC’s mandate are specific to mechanical royalties on interactive digital audio services — think Spotify, Apple Music, Amazon Music. YouTube and TikTok operate under different licensing structures, largely built on content ID systems and direct agreements between the platforms and rights holders, rather than the Section 115 compulsory license framework. A cover song properly licensed for streaming distribution still needs separate consideration for how it’s used on video platforms.

Why this history still matters for a 2026 release

Independent artists sometimes cite the MMA as evidence that cover licensing has gotten «easier» or less strict, which leads to skipping the license entirely on the assumption that streaming platforms will «sort it out.» They won’t. The MMA improved payment accuracy for songwriters; it did not remove the artist’s obligation to secure a mechanical license before distribution. Distributing an unlicensed cover still risks takedown, and the underlying legal exposure for unauthorized reproduction of a copyrighted composition hasn’t changed since the law passed.

What has changed practically is that services built after 2021 can plug into a more standardized licensing and royalty infrastructure. That’s the reason automatic mechanical licensing on a cover release can now be bundled into a $1 distribution fee instead of requiring a separate manual application to the Harry Fox Agency or a similar licensing body, which used to take weeks and cost a flat fee per song regardless of how many streams it generated.

How Globex Music handles this for you

Every cover song submitted through Globex Music includes automatic mechanical licensing as part of the release, so you’re not filing a separate compulsory license application or waiting on a third party to clear the rights before your track can go live. Combined with fast moderation and a $1 per release price point, this means the administrative work the MMA was designed to simplify on the collection side is matched on the artist side by a distribution process that doesn’t add friction or extra licensing fees per cover.

Payouts on cover songs start from $10 USD, and your release reaches over 200 platforms without an annual subscription fee. That’s a meaningfully different cost structure than DistroKid’s $44.99 per year, TuneCore’s $24.99 base fee plus per-cover licensing charges and a 20% commission on social platform revenue, or CD Baby’s $9.95 per single plus a 9% royalty commission that applies indefinitely. None of that changes your legal obligation to license the cover — it just determines how much of the process is handled for you and how much of your budget goes to fees instead of the release itself.

The bottom line

The Music Modernization Act fixed a broken royalty-collection system for songwriters on interactive streaming; it did not change the fact that covering someone else’s song requires a license. Understanding that distinction keeps you from assuming the law gave you new freedom to release covers casually, when in fact the requirement to license before you distribute is exactly as strict in 2026 as it was before 2021 — just administered through better infrastructure on the back end.