← All guides
Covers: who has to say yes
How to actually clear and release a cover in India — which routes work, which are closed, the letter to send, and what changes for traditional and devotional songs.
16 min read · checked August 2026
Three different rights, three different answers
Almost every argument about covers is really two people talking about different rights. Separate them and most of the confusion goes.
| What you want to do | The right involved | Can a standard licence cover it? |
|---|
| Record your own new performance of someone's song | Reproducing the composition — the melody and words | Yes, in principle. This is the only one any statutory scheme addresses. |
| Use the original artist's actual recording — a remix, a mashup, a sample, singing over the original backing | The sound recording | No. Never. Only the owner can permit this, and only by agreement. |
| Put any of it to picture — a music video, a reel, a film, an advert | Synchronisation | No. Always negotiated separately, on top of everything else. |
| Change the words, translate it, write a parody | Adaptation | No. Outside every statutory scheme in both India and the US. |
The line that catches most people: recording your own version and using someone else's recording feel similar and are legally nothing alike. Re-record everything, always. If any part of the original master is in your file, no cover licence in any country helps you.
Putting your cover on YouTube is a sync use, not just a cover. Even where the audio side is clean, Content ID will usually claim the video and route the revenue to whoever owns the song. That is not a mistake being made — that is the system working as designed.
India: the honest position
There is a statutory route. Whether it works for a streaming release is genuinely unsettled, and anyone telling you otherwise is going beyond what the law says.
Section 31C of the Copyright Act 1957 — added in 2012 — is the cover version provision. It is a statutory licence, which means it substitutes conditions for consent: meet every condition and you do not need the owner to agree. That is genuinely different from needing permission, and it is worth knowing because a lot of Indian guides state the opposite.
What the section actually requires
- Five calendar years must have passed since the end of the year the song was first recorded. Not five years since the film, since the recording.
- Fifteen days' written notice in advance, to the copyright owner and to the Registrar of Copyrights, with the particulars set out in the Copyright Rules 2013 — the work, any alterations, the owner's details, the previous recording, the number of copies, the medium, the price, and the royalty paid.
- Royalty paid in advance, at a rate fixed by the adjudicating body, for a minimum of fifty thousand copies of the work in each calendar year.
- Artwork and labels supplied in advance, and the release must state on its face that it is a cover version made under this section.
- No alteration to the words or the music, beyond what is technically necessary to make the recording.
- Packaging that is not likely to mislead, that does not name or picture any performer from an earlier recording, and that names your own performers.
- Registers and accounts kept, open to the owner's inspection.
Why that does not straightforwardly work for a streaming release
Read that list again with a streaming release in mind. Streams are not copies. There is no conversion from streams to the fifty-thousand-copy minimum, and no selling price to state. There is no natural place in store metadata for the cover-version declaration. And the five-year wait is written for a market where a cover was a physical product, not one where a cover of a new hit is out the same week.
We could not find evidence that any royalty rate has ever been fixed under section 31C, and we found no reported Indian judgment applying it since it came into force in 2012. If no rate exists, the advance-payment condition cannot literally be met — which makes the licence very hard to exercise on its own terms. Treat this as the open question it is.
There is also a signal from the neighbouring provision. In a 2019 dispute over section 31D — the statutory licence for broadcasting — the Bombay High Court held it covers radio and television and not internet streaming, reading the parliamentary history as deliberately excluding online services. That was a different section, and it is not authority on 31C. But it shows how Indian courts have approached a physical-and-broadcast-era licence asked to stretch over the internet: narrowly, and by the text.
Section 31C requires permission from the original artist.
It does not. The section opens by saying a person wanting to make a cover may do so subject to the provisions of this section — notice and advance royalty, not consent. Several widely-read Indian guides get this backwards.
There is a prescribed Form for the 31C notice.
There is not. The Copyright Rules 2013 set out what the notice must contain but attach no numbered form. Guides that cite one are confusing it with the compulsory licence applications under sections 31 and 31A.
The Copyright Board fixes the royalty.
It used to. The Board's functions went to the Appellate Board in 2017, and the Tribunals Reforms Act 2021 abolished that and substituted the Commercial Court. Any guide published before mid-2021 is stale on this, and so is the consolidated Act still hosted on the Copyright Office site.
What actually works in India
Direct permission. It is less elegant than a statutory licence and it is the only route we can put behind a release.
For Indian film music the label usually controls both the recording and, by assignment, the publishing — so one conversation with the label that released the original often clears everything. For non-film music, the composition may sit with the composer and lyricist and the recording with whoever paid for it, which means more than one conversation.
Permission from the composer alone is not enough. A cover uses the melody and the words, and those are separate works with separate owners. A Delhi High Court decision in May 2026 confirmed the structure directly: a composer can license adaptation of the musical work, but cannot authorise use of the lyrics or the sound recording, and cannot authorise a recreation that reproduces the original lyrics. Clear the lyric side too, in writing.
What we need from you before we can release a cover
- Written permission from whoever owns the song — an email from the label or publisher is fine, a verbal yes is not.
- Who gave it and what it covers. Recording only, or recording and video? Worldwide, or India? Time-limited?
- Your own recording, with nothing of the original master in it.
- The cover declared on the upload form, with the original song named. An undeclared cover is a takedown waiting to happen, and it puts the whole release at risk rather than the one track.
- Correct credits. The original performing artist does not go in your artist field or your title. Store rules on this are strict and a soundalike cover is refused outright at most of them.
There is no service in India that sells you a cover licence the way Easy Song or Songfile does in the United States. IPRS licenses the streaming platforms for the composition side, and PPL and RMPL license sound recordings for public performance — none of them issues an individual cover licence to a creator. If a site offers you one for an Indian film song, ask what exactly it is selling.
So how do you actually make one?
Four routes. Two of them work, one is hard, and one is closed — and which you are on is decided by the song you picked, before you record a note.
| The song you want to cover | Does it work? | Why |
|---|
| Traditional or devotional — a bhajan, keerthana, folk song, hymn | Yes | Nobody owns it. Record it, arrange it yourself, and it is yours. No permission to chase. |
| By someone you can actually reach — an independent composer, a regional or devotional label, someone whose email exists | Yes | You ask, and these requests get answered — often generously, because your cover promotes their song. |
| Not Indian, and commercially released in the US | Yes | The US gives you a compulsory licence — the owner cannot refuse. For streaming, the services' own blanket licence covers it. |
| An Indian film song from a major label | Hard, and usually silence | They are set up for film sync deals in the tens of lakhs. There is no product for a small cover request, and most publish no way to ask. |
There is no Indian equivalent of Songfile or Easy Song. No service sells you a cover licence for Indian repertoire. We looked at eleven major Indian labels: two publish any licensing contact at all, and neither publishes a cover product. If a website offers to sell you an Indian cover licence, ask which rights holder authorised it and check the company actually exists before paying anything.
I'll file a section 31C notice and cover whatever I want.
The statutory route is legally real and practically dead. The notice requires advance royalty at a rate published in the Official Gazette — and no cover-version rate has ever been published. The body that was supposed to set it was abolished in 2021, so getting a rate now means going to a Commercial Court. We found no evidence of any independent artist ever completing this. Do not plan around it.
I'll buy a cover licence from my old distributor for $12 a year.
Those products are built on US compulsory licensing and are valid for US releases. They do nothing for an Indian song. One large distributor states outright that Indian covers need explicit permission directly from the copyright owners and that its own licensing partners cannot help.
It's fine on YouTube, so it's fine everywhere.
YouTube tolerating a cover is not a licence. What usually happens is that the publisher's Content ID claims your video and takes the revenue — the video stays up and you earn nothing. That is the system working, not a loophole, and it has no bearing at all on whether you may put the same recording on Spotify.
Doing it: the actual steps
This is the route that works — a direct ask. It is unglamorous and it is the only one we can put a release behind.
1. Find out who actually owns it
You are looking for two things that are usually held by different people: who owns the music, and who owns the words. Start free:
- The IPRS repertoire search at iprs.org — public, no login, and it returns the composer, lyricist and publisher with their roles. IPRS itself labels it a beta and says the catalogue is still being uploaded, so a song missing from it is not a song with no owner.
- The ℗ line on the original in Spotify or Apple. That names the recording owner, which is not the right you need — but for Indian film music it is usually the same company, so it is the best first clue.
- The MLC public search and the ISWC Network, as cross-checks. Both free. Neither will tell you who to ask, but they confirm you have the right song and the right writers.
A rule of thumb that saves time: for a film song released before 2012, assume the label controls everything and write to the label. After 2012 the composition side may sit with the composer and lyricist, which gives you a second door — but the label is still the party whose objection takes your release down, so it remains the address that matters.
2. Send a letter that can be answered
Most requests a rights desk receives are a paragraph saying "can I cover your song", with nothing in it anyone can act on. A letter that identifies both works, states plainly that nothing of the original recording will be used, and asks for named permissions can be answered by return — and that alone puts you ahead of almost everyone writing in.
- Name the song, the film or album, the composer and the lyricist.
- Ask for the recording permission and, separately and explicitly, sync if you want a video. A permission that turns out not to cover the video is discovered at the worst possible moment.
- Undertake that you will use none of the original master, will not alter melody or lyrics, and will not use the original performers' names or images.
- Say the writers will be credited in full so their royalties reach them. That sentence does more work than any other in the letter.
- Offer to agree whatever royalty they think fair. You are asking for permission, not a discount.
We write this letter for you. On any track marked as a cover, there is a panel that fills it in from your release details and produces something you can send. It also records the reply, so the permission is on the file rather than in your inbox.
3. Give it a deadline, and have a second song
For a major label, silence is the most likely outcome — not a refusal you can respond to, just nothing. Set yourself a month. If nothing comes back, move to a song you can clear. Recording first and asking afterwards is how people end up with a finished track they cannot release.
4. Record everything yourself
Not one second of the original recording. Not the backing track, not a stem someone sent you, not an instrumental lifted from a video. Permission to cover a song is never permission to use the recording of it, and our scan will find it whatever you were told.
5. Send us the permission with the release
- The written permission — an email is fine, a phone call is not.
- Declare the cover on the upload form and name the original song. An undeclared cover puts the whole release at risk, not just the one track.
- Credit the writers, not yourself. This is how the songwriting money reaches the people who wrote it, and getting it wrong is how it goes nowhere.
- Keep the original artist out of your artist field and out of your title. Store rules on this are strict, and a soundalike cover is refused outright at most of them.
A word on the five-year rule, because it is the first thing people find. The statutory provision requires five full calendar years after the original recording. That does not mean a cover becomes free after five years — the other conditions still fail, and the route still does not work. It means that before five years there is no argument at all to fall back on.
Traditional and devotional songs
A bhajan, a keerthana, a folk song or a hymn is usually free to record. What is almost never free is the version you learned it from.
Ask three separate questions, in this order. They have different answers and people collapse them into one.
| Question | Usually | Where it goes wrong |
|---|
| Is the composition out of copyright? | Yes, for genuinely old material. Nobody owns a traditional melody. | A 20th-century devotional song with a named composer is not traditional, however traditional it sounds. Nor is a film version of one. |
| Are the words out of copyright? | Usually, for ancient text. | Lyrics are a separate work with a separate author and a separate term. An old melody can carry a modern lyricist's words. |
| Is the recording or arrangement you are working from out of copyright? | Almost never. | This is where people get claimed. Copying a label's arrangement — its instrumentation, its harmonies, its structure — infringes even when the underlying song is free to everyone. |
Copyright in India runs for 60 years, counted from the beginning of the year after the trigger: after the author's death for a musical or literary work, after publication for a sound recording. For jointly written work it runs from the death of the last surviving author.
So: record a traditional song yourself, arrange it yourself, and you own your recording outright and owe nobody anything. Learn it from a particular record and reproduce that record's arrangement, and you have taken something that belongs to whoever made it.
This is also why our copyright scan flags devotional and traditional material constantly, and why almost none of those flags are what they look like. The scan can tell that two recordings share audio. It cannot tell whether that is because someone copied you or because you both recorded the same 400-year-old song. The question we will ask you is not whether it is the same song — it is whether it is the same performance.
The Copyright Act's exemptions for performance at a religious ceremony, or for the benefit of a religious institution, are about live performance. They do not authorise a commercial release on streaming services. This one catches temple and church groups regularly.
If your song is not Indian
The US system is genuinely different, and better — but it covers less than people think.
In the United States, section 115 gives a compulsory mechanical licence to record your own version of a song that has already been released there commercially. You do not need the owner's agreement; you follow the process and pay the statutory rate, which for 2026 is 13.1 cents per song for physical copies and permanent downloads, or 2.52 cents a minute, whichever is greater.
Since 2021 there is also a blanket licence held by the streaming services themselves and administered by the Mechanical Licensing Collective. The practical effect surprises people: for interactive streaming on a licensed US service, the platform's own licence clears the mechanical, and the covering artist does not need to buy one. For downloads and physical copies, they still do.
- The US licence covers US-released songs only. An unreleased song, a live-only song, or a song released only outside the US is outside it.
- You may arrange it to suit your performance, but you may not change the basic melody or the fundamental character — and your arrangement is not yours to own unless the owner agrees in writing.
- It does not cover video. The definition of the thing it licenses expressly excludes sound accompanying an audiovisual work, which is exactly why a music video needs a separate sync licence.
- It does not cover the original recording. Nothing statutory ever does.
The Mechanical Licensing Collective does not issue licences to artists — it holds the blanket licence for services, and it is where songwriters register works in order to be paid. Registering with it is worth doing if you write. It is not a step in clearing a cover.
Where this comes from
Checked August 2026. Rules change and pages move — if something here no longer matches what you find, tell us and we will correct it.
General information, not legal, tax or financial advice. Where money or rights are at stake — a cover licence, a dispute, your tax position — get a professional who can look at your actual situation.
MusicMCN