How to Write Metadata for a Cover Song Release

Cover song metadata boils down to a handful of fields that must match reality exactly: the original songwriter’s legal name, the correct song title, and a clear ‘Version’ or ‘Cover’ tag distinguishing your recording from the original. Get these three things wrong and you risk moderation delays, licensing rejections, or royalties routed to the wrong party. Get them right and a cover can clear review and go live in a day or two.

Metadata isn’t paperwork for its own sake. It’s the data trail that mechanical licensing, royalty collection, and platform matching systems all rely on. A cover song has two layers of authorship baked into one release — the original songwriter’s composition and your recording of it — and metadata is the only mechanism that keeps those two layers properly separated and correctly credited.

What metadata fields actually matter for a cover song?

Five fields do almost all the work: track title, artist name, songwriter/composer credit, release type, and version tag. Everything else — genre, mood tags, descriptive keywords — is useful for discovery but has no bearing on licensing or moderation.

Track title: Should match the original song’s title as commonly registered, not a stylized or abbreviated version.
Performing artist: Your name or your band’s name — never the original artist’s name.
Songwriter/composer credit: The legal name(s) of the person or people who wrote the original composition, not you (unless you also co-wrote it).
Release type/version tag: A clear indicator such as ‘Cover’ or the arrangement style, so the release is unambiguously identified as a cover recording rather than an original.
ISRC: A new, unique code generated for your specific recording — never reused from the original release.

How do you find the correct songwriter name for a cover?

Check the original release’s liner notes, the publisher’s catalog listing, or a performance rights organization’s public database, and use the legal name as registered there — not the performing artist’s stage name if they didn’t write the song. For example, a song made famous by a vocalist is often written by a separate songwriter or songwriting team, and it’s that name that belongs in the composer field, not the singer’s.

This distinction trips up more first-time cover artists than any other metadata issue. If a well-known singer’s version of a song was actually written by someone else, crediting the singer as songwriter is factually wrong and can cause a licensing mismatch, since mechanical royalties for the composition are owed to the actual writer, not the performer who made it popular.

Should the cover artist’s name appear anywhere in the songwriter field?

No — unless you genuinely co-wrote new lyrics, a translation, or a substantially reworked arrangement that qualifies as a new composition. A straightforward cover, even with a different genre or tempo, does not entitle you to a songwriter credit. Listing yourself as a co-writer on a standard cover is one of the most common metadata errors reviewers flag, because it misrepresents authorship of the underlying composition.

How should the title field be formatted?

Use the original, commonly recognized title exactly, with your version tag added afterward in parentheses if your platform supports it — for example, ‘Title (Cover)’ or ‘Title (Acoustic Cover)’. Avoid adding the original artist’s name directly into the title field itself; that’s what the separate ‘original artist’ or ‘written by’ field is for. Title fields that read like ‘Title — Originally by [Artist]’ frequently get rejected or edited during moderation because they blur the line between your release and someone else’s.

Does genre or mood tagging affect licensing?

No. Genre, mood, and descriptive tags are purely for playlist placement and discovery algorithms; they have zero bearing on mechanical licensing or royalty routing. Where they do matter is practical: a metal cover of a pop ballad should be tagged accurately by its actual genre, not the genre of the original, so it reaches the right listeners and playlist curators.

A worked example: correct vs. incorrect metadata

Say you’re releasing an acoustic cover of a hit pop song originally written by a professional songwriting team and performed by a well-known vocalist.

Incorrect: Title: ‘Song Title — [Original Artist] Cover’; Artist: [Original Artist] feat. [Your Name]; Songwriter: [Original Artist’s name]; Version tag: none.

Correct: Title: ‘Song Title (Acoustic Cover)’; Artist: [Your Name]; Songwriter: [Actual songwriting team’s legal names]; Original artist field (if platform provides one): [Original Artist]; Version tag: Cover.

The corrected version separates every layer cleanly: who performed it (you), who wrote it (the actual songwriters), what it originally was (for reference only), and what this recording is (a cover). That separation is exactly what licensing systems and streaming platforms need to process the release without a manual review flag.

Why does inaccurate metadata delay moderation?

Because a distributor’s moderation team has to manually verify and correct anything ambiguous before the release can clear automatic licensing checks, and manual review always takes longer than an automated pass. A cover with clean, accurate metadata can move through mechanical licensing and moderation in as little as a day or two on Globex Music, since the automatic licensing system can confirm the composition and process the release without back-and-forth. A cover with a misspelled songwriter name, a missing version tag, or a songwriter field pointing to the wrong person routinely adds days to that timeline while the error gets caught and corrected.

Why does this affect royalties, not just approval speed?

Royalty payouts for the composition side of a cover are tied directly to the songwriter data attached to the release, so an incorrect name in that field can mean royalties intended for the actual writer never reach them correctly, and it can also flag your release for correction before payout. Globex Music pays out starting from $10 USD, and clean metadata is what keeps that payout process moving without holds. This is separate from your performance royalties as the recording artist, which are tied to your artist profile and ISRC, not the songwriter field.

Metadata checklist before you submit a cover

Track title matches the original song’s commonly registered title, with a clear cover/version tag added.
Songwriter field lists the actual composer(s) of the original song, verified against liner notes or a PRO database — not the original performer unless they also wrote it.
Your artist name appears only in the performing artist field, never the songwriter field, unless you made a genuinely new arrangement or translation.
A new, unique ISRC is generated for your recording.
Genre and mood tags reflect your actual version, not the original’s genre.
No promotional language, original artist names, or extra symbols appear in the title field itself.

None of this requires special software or a licensing background — it requires checking one authoritative source for the songwriter’s legal name and being disciplined about which name goes in which field. Distributors like Globex Music build automatic mechanical licensing into the release process specifically so that accurate metadata, submitted once, is enough to get a cover licensed and live without the artist having to negotiate anything separately — a meaningful difference from platforms like TuneCore, where covers can carry additional per-release licensing fees on top of the base annual subscription.