Keeping the Rights to Your Own Recording of a Cover Song

One of the most misunderstood parts of releasing a cover song is figuring out who owns what. Artists often assume that because they didn’t write the song, they somehow don’t fully own their own recording of it. That’s not true — and understanding the split between the underlying composition and your recorded performance is the key to protecting your work.

Let’s break down exactly what belongs to you, what belongs to the original songwriter, and how to make sure nobody can take your master recording away from you.

Two Separate Copyrights, One Song

Every cover song involves two distinct copyrights that exist independently of each other:

The composition copyright — the lyrics and melody, owned by the songwriter(s) and typically administered by a publisher or collected through a PRO (performance rights organization).
The sound recording copyright (the «master») — the actual audio you recorded: your vocal take, your arrangement, your instrumentation, your mix.

When you release a cover, you are licensing the right to use someone else’s composition. You are not licensing the right to use someone else’s recording — you’re making a brand new one. That new recording is its own separate, fully protectable copyright, and it belongs to you.

What Mechanical Licensing Actually Covers

A mechanical license grants you permission to reproduce and distribute a copyrighted composition in a new audio recording. It does not transfer any ownership of the composition to you, and it doesn’t require you to transfer anything to the songwriter in return beyond the standard mechanical royalty. It simply clears the legal path for your version to exist.

With Globex Music, this licensing is handled automatically as part of your release — you don’t need to track down publishers or file paperwork yourself. You still write, arrange, perform, and record the track. That performance is yours.

What You Own Outright

Once your cover is recorded, you hold full ownership of:

Your vocal performance and any original phrasing or delivery choices
Your instrumental arrangement, if it differs from the original
Your mix and master
The specific audio file itself, in its exact recorded form

This means you can distribute it, license it for sync opportunities (subject to separate sync clearance for the composition), and collect royalties generated by that specific recording — including streaming royalties, which Globex Music pays out starting from just $10 USD, with no annual fee attached to keep that catalog active.

What You Don’t Own — And Never Will, By Covering It

No matter how popular your version becomes, covering a song never grants you any of the following:

Co-ownership of the composition
The right to prevent others from also covering the same song
The right to alter the core lyrics or melody beyond a compulsory license’s allowances without separate permission
Any claim to the original artist’s specific recorded performance

This is a two-way street: just as you don’t gain rights to the composition, nobody can claim rights to your specific recording just because they wrote the original song. The songwriter earns from the composition. You earn from your recording. Both live comfortably side by side.

A Worked Example

Say you release a cover through Globex Music for $1, no annual fee. Over three years, your recording stays live across 200+ platforms, generating streaming royalties that you collect starting from a $10 payout threshold. Compare that to a service charging a recurring annual fee just to keep the release online — TuneCore’s base plan runs $24.99/year, DistroKid runs $44.99/year, and CD Baby charges $9.95 per single plus a 9% commission on royalties forever. Over three years, those costs stack up regardless of whether the composition rights ever change hands — because what you’re really paying for in every case is distribution and catalog upkeep, not ownership of the composition.

Your master recording rights don’t depend on which distributor you use. They exist the moment you record. What a distributor affects is cost, speed to market, and how long your catalog stays stable without draining your budget.

Protecting Your Recording in Practice

A few habits keep your rights clean and easy to prove later:

Keep your original session files, stems, and project files — they’re your proof of authorship of the recording.
Register accurate metadata at release time, correctly crediting the original songwriter while listing yourself as the performing artist and recording owner.
Use a distributor that handles mechanical licensing automatically, so there’s a documented, legitimate paper trail for the composition side of things.
Keep release confirmations and distribution records as a timestamp of when your recording entered the market.

Fast Moderation Means Faster Protection

The sooner your recording is live and timestamped through a distributor, the sooner you have a clear public record of your version existing. Globex Music’s fast moderation process is built for artists releasing covers regularly — get a track reviewed, licensed, and live quickly rather than waiting through a drawn-out review queue while your master recording rights sit unestablished in the marketplace.

The bottom line: covering a song is not a compromise on ownership. You’re licensing someone else’s words and melody, but the recording — the performance, the arrangement, the mix — is entirely, permanently yours.