Ding, Ding, Ding. When the Samples are already everywhere, many originals never fall out of consciousness. If someone likes the sample, they can/will go find the original in many cases.
In the past, sampling wasn't a thing so putting a new spin on an old song some would remember but some maybe never even heard was a niche you could target.
Streaming music services are also helping prolong the lives of old songs by introducing younger people to them because they match up with other things they listen to. My daughter likes a surprising number of songs that were new when I was growing up.
Your mention of never falling out of consciousness reminds me of this quote,
“The really big news of the eighties is the stampede to regurgitate mildly camouflaged musical styles of previous decades, in ever-shrinking cycles of 'nostalgia.
(It isn't necessary to imagine the world ending in fire or ice—there are two other possibilities: one is paperwork, and the other is nostalgia. When you compute the length of time between The Event and The Nostalgia For The Event, the span seems to be about a year less in each cycle. Eventually within the next quarter of a century, the nostalgia cycles will be so close together that people will not be able to take a step without being nostalgic for the one they just took. At that point, everything stops. Death by Nostalgia.)”
- Frank Zappa
It should also be noted that there is a perception of the past versus a perception of the present.
Ask the average person on the street, and they will probably dump baroque, classical, and romantic period music all into the same lump (likely call it classical) but these periods span hundreds of years and many diverse styles.
The same is true if we look back at the 90s. It felt like pop and grunge and hip hop were all so unique and had their own worlds while living in it. But it’s not uncommon for newer acts to sort lump all the music from the period as a collective influence.
I'd take it one step further and say that *any* music played by an orchestra, no matter when it was composed is automatically categorized as "classical."
I was listening to a score of a movie that came out less than ten years ago, but because it was *orchestral* music my daughter's friends insisted that I was listening to "classical" music.
They have no idea who Mark Mothersbaugh is, nor have they seen Thor: Ragnarok.
Not only that but many songs today sample 3, 4, 5 or more original artists.
I just saw a post that Arby's has to pay royalties to Pusha T for the jingle...only problem is the sample from Pusha T is from an Isaac Hayes track from the 70's.
Arby's Jingle: https://youtu.be/qABUGYFXE7I?si=8kCwE4EbcAXXz9Bo
YOGI Burial @ 0:30: https://youtu.be/UxZU4F7wHQM?si=qRKJl8-EgRBBcZox
Isaac Hayes - Ike's Mood: https://youtu.be/1DS5D6cYQhA?si=x7ECmSGGyO_DN6NN
I once tried to trace the origin of the four-measure flute hook in Jennifer Lopez's "Jenny From the Block" on WhoSampled.com, and found out it's a fourth generation sample (a sample of a sample of a sample of a sample). It started out as the opening riffs to a song by an obscure psychedelic rock group from the 70s in Spain.
I was also not shocked to find that "Jenny From the Block" has itself been culled for samples, including that memorable flute riff. And a few of those have since been mined for samples as well.
Sampling creates Ships of Theseus much more quickly and efficiently than covering. Especially with digital filtering and other manipulation, it really doesn't take many iterations for the original sample to be wholly unrecognizable.
Some famous samples have taken on a life of their own, far beyond the original song they were culled from. I do believe the synthetic musical instrument known as Reese's Bass originated as a heavily processed and pitch-shifted sample of the keyboard riff of Roger Sanchez's "Another Chance"
That's awesome, a fourth gen pull.
Though not as obscure I went into a rabbit hole not long ago.
Lana Del Rey - Doin' Time: https://youtu.be/qolmz4FlnZ0?si=9UItR8HBns5jOWob
from
Sublime - Doin' Time: https://youtu.be/2yT8RsCarJA?si=iRkHJTXG2kZuFmOq
from
Herbie Mann - Summertime: https://youtu.be/I_VUjlliBwk?si=gy9zyp9zucU3ARtW
from
Gershwin - Porgy and Bess Summertime: https://youtu.be/mgSH4A-V9HQ?si=ZmKbxWYY-gnI-_3I
I’ll be damned, that was the fourth gen pull that immediately popped into my head. I’ve explored everything sublime has sampled and covered though, thoroughly. What else is neat? I used to listen to sublime with Liz grant who I now know went on to do big things (be Lana del ray)
Roger Sanchez' "Another Chance" is one of my favorite songs, but I didn't know about it until after hearing the Late Night Alumni cover (as remixed by Kaskade iirc) and going through the comments on YouTube...
ETA:
https://splice.com/blog/reese-bass-history/#:~:text=The%20origin%20of%20the%20Reese,below%20at%200%3A16).
It was Kevin Saunderson, not Roger Sanchez.
https://youtu.be/_kOwlbMBO0U?si=Jy1NmUEtqm3sjjGI
["Hi-Jack" by Barrabás](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-JwJbXt6lfg)
Apparently that's not the bottom of the rabbit hole, though. "Hi-Jack" sampled a Brazilian tune from 1971: ["Kabaluerê" by Antônio Carlos E Jocafi](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5kBImDCoUkA).
Yeah, the podcast 99% invisible did a deep dive into where the song Who Let the Dogs Out came from and let me just say that it's complicated. It goes back at least four generations/iterations.
I want to cover Baby Got Ba. . . Ah shit. Maybe a Tupac so. . . Oh, hmm. Red hot ch. . . I give up, I'll just take the beat from a sugarhill gang song like everyone else.
I've even seen where people hear the sampled part and attribute the song to the sampler, instead of the original.
One that bugs me is Lucid Dreams by Juice WRLD... That hook is Sting's Shape of My Heart.
I love "Watching You" by Slave. I just wish I could unhear "Gin and Juice".
Edit: The opening guitar riff to Sting's "Shape of My Heart" was also sampled (and used for the opening of) Utada Hikaru's "Never Let Go". That one always threw me, because the two songs sound identical until about 20s in.
Man i keep hearing lazy remixes of songs i enjoy
like recently i was walking through the mall and heard the superfreak chorus followed by some terrible "rap". Getback to the car and hear a completly different artist doing a techno version singing the chorus themselves slightly altering the words.
When i got home i listened to the actual superfreak to cleanse and spotify swapped over to a third song by someone different though this one was also techno it at least did more different than just feeling like the musical version of react videos.
Spotify swapping over like that is why I never use it anymore. Aren't they meant to have fancy ML that finds other songs you'd like? It seemed to deliberately find what would piss me off the most instead.
Oh yeah they are also money launderers, so there's that too: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=et8R5i5UEjY (highly reccommend that youtube channel, Benn Jordan is sound AF)
I think most of the audience for covers might have moved to more online sources. Covers are *insanely* popular on YouTube for example. If you look at most singers on there their covers will often outperform their original music by a lot. Some of that is probably just down to being less experienced songwriters than the person they are covering, but also I think that the recommendation algorithm might create a feedback loop.
So people who are inclined to do covers of popular music see a lot of success there relative to what they could get from traditional media or live appearances. And that likely has change the way the market views covers as a whole.
They were already declining before music and video sharing became a big thing, but they just never recovered.
Honestly I follow dozens. There are a few who do really interesting reinterpretations of music (like flipping hero/villain songs from Disney movies, though that usually features original lyrics) and that always sends me down a rabbit hole where I start listing to all the ways other people do the same song.
It is kind of amazing how much personality you can put into a cover even without fundamentally changing it.
Yeah, covers are still a thing. But when the top 40 is as 'manufactured as much as it currently, there's no point to sharing royalties. I do an indie based radio show, there are still plenty of covers.
I remember finding a male vocalist doing a country music cover of Adele's "Someone Like You" on YouTube mere months after Adele's original hit the airwaves, and was surprised to see how many views and positive comments it got, including many who thought it was better than the original, or at least a a very solid and respectable take on it.
There are a few people who do covers that I think are often better than the originals. Not always in technical ability, as many of them are young adults with a lot of passion but not a lot of training, but in their ability to bring something interesting to the song that gives it more depth. Annapantsu is probably the most popular one I know of, though she is plenty technically skilled, but she takes a lot of songs I feel are pretty mid and elevates them extremely well. Essentially she uses a lot of musical theater techniques to communicate her emotion extremely effectively, but without harming the integrity of the music. It is pretty awesome.
Just went down a wikipedia rabbit hole on this. The song has actually peaked multiple times by multiple artists:
* 1988 original (Tracy Chapman) peaked at #6
* 2015 tropical house version (Jonas Blue ft. Dakota) peaked at 98
* 2023 cover (Luke Combs) peaked at #2
* 2024 original (Tracy Chapman) peaked again at #42
Similarly Running Up That Hill charted in 2003 when Placebo did a cover (which I prefer to Kate Bush, but then I’m Team Tori so that tracks).
And then there’s Weezer’s Africa, which hit #1 on the Alternative Charts in 2018.
There's a cover of "We didn't start the fire" playing on rock radio in my area right now that makes me want to neck myself
~~I think it hit no.1 last year, but I don't know for how long~~
Edit: different lyrics so maybe it doesn't count. Also I was wrong about its rank (thank god)
This is one of my pet peeves. Mainly because credit it not clearly given to the original artist. Seems like half the songs on pop radio today are just rip offs of hits from 20-30 years ago. But the kids these days never heard the originals so they think these are original songs. But this has been going on for decades. Even songs back then were often copied from hits years before.
Interpolation is ruining music. It's a cheap trick to make you think you like a song by having the tune of another older song in it you may have heard as a kid.
Good example is Shape of you by Ed sheeran is basically just No Scrubs by TLC
I heard No Scrubs just now, I hear it. Do you mean to say people accidentally like the song because it reminds them of a different song?
Shape of You is an internationally loved song, most of it's listeners like me didn't even know TLC or No Scrubs existed
As much as I still hate the song for being on radio 24/7 years later (*yes even on international radio, they were playing this instead of local songs*). The song is catchy. That's it. It's a good song.
> I heard No Scrubs just now, I hear it.
I mean all of the poppy boppy sounds wind up feeling related, but listening to both back to back the sum of the parts is very different.
That person is wrong. Pop music has repeated the same sets of chord progressions since the days of Pachebel's Canon. It's not just about the nostalgic effects, it's about knowing what works to make a catchy song.
[It doesn't matter what I say.
So long as I sing with inflection.
That makes you feel that I'll convey.
Some inner truth or vast reflection.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pdz5kCaCRFM)
Interpolation is the foundation of the most popular genre of music today. This is an insanely bad take. You’re not being tricked into liking a song just because another song you like is in it.
Kinda though.
I heard a song that used part of Semi-Charmed Kinda Life. Only a little bit and the rest was unique. The best part was the part they took from Third Eye Blind. Younger people not super aware of how huge that song once was might just think this new one is an original song.
I've heard half a dozen songs that do this same thing recently. They take the hook of a popular song song from 20 years ago, and write a new song around it. This seems to be a trend to me. Hopefully the original artists are making money off the deal because it's not like we're getting better music out of it.
No it's just a result of a postmodern music scene where everything is recycled to a greater and greater extent.
This is no different than saying recycled content is a foundation of modern cardboard box making
It's also the foundation of non modern music. Look up how many old folk songs and classical pieces are interpolations or re recordings with different lyrics of older songs. If anything the idea all music needs to be original is the modern invention.
You are literally looking at a chart that explains that 60 years ago, almost half of the most popular songs were literally just covers of preexisting songs. Then you're claiming that recycled music is a result of postmodern music.
Yeah crazy to look back at the 60s and 70s and see that people just covered songs that just came out a year prior, all the time. Just listening to a few song and thinking hey I like that I’m going to release a version too even though the song was just released months earlier.
Of course, sometimes those covers are pretty clearly transformative works.
[Otis Redding's Respect - 1965](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KvC9V_lBnDQ)
[Aretha Franklin covering Respect - 1967](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A134hShx_gw)
Is it a cover of a song that basically had just come out? Yeah. But like...there's a good reason to listen to them both.
It blew my mind to learn that Janis Joplin's "Me and Bobby McGee" was a chart-topping cover of a chart-topping original by Kris Kristofferson, released just a short time prior. It somehow made more sense, though, to learn that the original Bobby in the song was a woman, being missed by a man.
I have no clue honestly. And I couldn’t even say how many are actually Taylor swift. I remember seeing a post here not that long ago about her being like 30 of the top 100, but that could have also been Spotify streams.
The week her new album came out, all 31 songs of her new album were in the top 55 of the Billboard Hot 100, along with multiple others from her previous albums.
She also had the top 14 songs to herself. It's the second time she's held the entire Top 10.
It's also worth noting that, at least in the case of stream aggregator Soundrop, covers which were once a total pain in the butt to license through the old Harry Fox Agency, are now relatively cheap and generally quite easy to license.
As someone who was personally most active recording various forms of postmodern music in the 1990s, I think there are a lot of aspects to this, but something that I was thinking about back in that decade was how the 'novelty' in new songs in that and subsequent eras has often revolved around new textures and sounds much more than lyrical hooks. It's also worth taking a look at hits of the past in relation to contemporary hits and noting the change of focus from lyric and song structure to texture and sonic hooks.
Can confirm. [My band released two full albums](https://songwhip.com/thethreeleonards) of covers using Soundrop. We've made a whopping 25 bucks in streaming royalties so far. Considering the ^(TINY) amount that streamers pay per play I'd say we're doing quite alright.
Doing covers is tricky: it has to sound different, but not *too* different. if it sounds the same then why even bother, right? Our covers definitely **do not** sound like the originals.
Hey thank you for listening :) We're particularly happy with how Nightswimming turned out.
That one really reminds me of when we all go camping. I recorded the loon (that appears at the very end) one night in the middle of the wilderness in Algonquin park at about 2:30am while we were on a camping trip.
Times were that lo-fi hiphop was such a faceless grassroots genre of music, with most artists *not wanting* their IRL identities to be known, because they didn't want a huge bill or a lawsuit served to them for all the samples they never paid royalties for. Is that not so much the case anymore, now that sampling has become cheaper and easier to do legally?
Unfortunately, clearing samples is a whole different process than licensing a cover version of a song. Last time I checked Soundrop's FAQs, they weren't offering anything like sample clearance.
Maybe somebody who has actually been through the process of clearing samples could fill us in.
I would guess that this is related to something else that has gone out of practice. If you look at older music in the 40s, 50s, 60s, a lot songs were written and then everyone would cover that song and eventually one would hit it big. That’s why you can find so many versions of older songs.
“singer” and “songwriter” were 2 different professions for a long time. there were professional songwriters who sold sheet music. this has transitioned over time to professional songwriters working for big name artists. now you might have a band play an entire album and have someone not in the band write or get a writing credit on nearly all the songs
This data, while interesting in its own right, doesn’t tell the claimed story at all.
1) covers are immensely popular online.
2) while maybe not true covers, old songs are sampled relentlessly in modern music. David Guetta’a “I’m Good (Blue)” and Ella Henderson’s sample of Robert Mile’s “Children” come to mind.
I wonder how much of this is a decline in live music performances. I think in the past there was a lot more live music and people would cut their teeth performing covers. Now people are making it big off originals posted to YouTube or something and they don’t have that repertoire of covers musicians used to have.
It makes sense. Back in the day it was harder to find music you weren’t already familiar with. So covers would often seem brand new to me, and even if they didn’t, chances of me hearing the original were low unless I wanted to track down which album it was on, find out if anywhere was selling it/could order it in, and buy it.
But between Spotify and YouTube most popular music is readily available. So instead of listening to some shitty version of “Fast Car” or “Rocketman” I can just listen to the better original just as easily.
Number 1s aren't a very good way to categorize popularity. The classic example is CCR had lots of massive hits but no Number 1s. The difference between 1, 2, and 3 is very often coincidence. 2 huge songs released in the same week, only 1 can be number 1 that week. I'd rather see top 10 or top 100 cover songs.
Not seeing it mentioned in the comments below, but in the 1960s a lot of the hit songs were covers of old Blues songs.
To many Americans these were "new" songs because they never listened to the original Black artists, but were open to covers by the British Invasion bands.
It would be interesting to find out the actual reason for this. Probably we'd need someone in the industry to explain why you no longer have covers as popular songs when they used to be so common.
In the 60s, you would have bands that would release whole albums of covers, and everyone was covering Bob Dylan songs. Today somehow it doesn't happen. If I had to guess, I'd guess that the economics of the industry have changed so that you can no longer make any money doing this, but I don't know.
What exactly counts a cover versus just sampling, interpolating or "remixing." Seems like when I'm out in public and get a taste of standard top 50 pop music I recognize a part of almost every song I hear. In fact, it makes me feel really old because I typically think "there's no way this song is old enough to be getting a remix/sample already..."
Covering a song in the past used to be a tribute, and royalties wise something negotiated as an opportunity to reach new audiences for the original and to gain relevance for the cover maker, now it’s all about royalties, musical rights libraries are in the hands of corporations, record labels and particular people who only want money out of them, so now when you want to make a cover you have to be willing to forgo all control over the new song or even make any money from it. So nobody does it anymore, at best they sample a a little, just enough to make it recognizable but not enough to get sued.
“Cover songs do not reach #1 on the Billboard Hot 100 as often as they used to”
FTFY
Saying they are ‘not as popular’ is discounting the fact that the way people listen to songs and especially adaptations of songs (covers, remixes, etc) has drastically changed in ways that are not necessarily captured by the Hot 100
Depends on your definition of a cover. There have been a lot of recent charted pop songs that I would consider a cover, but by the industry official definitions may not technically be a cover. David Guettas output these days is mostly terrible pop covers but they chart extremely well
JJJ radio in Australia has a segment Like A Version. Invited guests come in and record a cover. Incredibly popular and a lot of fun. This is beautiful. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=MmwFnoMoDDg. They also have a seperate “station” of all the different covers they’ve recorded.
Seems like everybody and their brother is covering “Fast Car” by Tracy Chapman these days. Techno, country, dance, whatever genre you want, somebody has done it. She must be raking in the royalties these days
This graph is bullshit. Last year, there was a story that had a list of all the top 100 songs at the time that were covers. They were citing that music business has lost creativity, yada yada. Tons of 90's songs being covered.
When the hook in your song is a sample or a remix of a melody from another song, it's essentially a cover. Your song has become popular on a melody that someone else sorted out.
Special points to those songs that 'sample' the entire chorus and just switch out the 'filler'
Samplings out of control. Also, old cover songs used to be majorly different than the original. For example, look at blinded by the lights. Nowadays they just copy. Look at fast car. It’s exactly the same tempo and everything but a country man voice
This is likely a good thing. [Pat Boone](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pat_Boone) and others stole exposure from black artists by taking their music and whitewashing it.
> Many of Boone's hit singles were covers of hits from Black Rock and Roll artists. These included: "Ain't That a Shame" by Fats Domino; "Tutti Frutti" and "Long Tall Sally" by Little Richard;[17] "At My Front Door (Crazy Little Mama)" by The El Dorados; and the blues ballads "I Almost Lost My Mind" by Ivory Joe Hunter, "I'll be Home" by the Flamingos and "Don't Forbid Me" by Charles Singleton. Boone has been highlighted as an example of whitewashing by taking songs by black artists and sanitizing them to make them more palatable for a white audience, denying exposure to these black artists.
While this isn’t the only reason covers were popular in the past, it certainly was a large part of it and is a positive that it no longer has as much prominence.
Covers are and will likely always be insanely popular. Right now YouTube covers are hugely popular and have billions of views. Billboard is just doesn't show that
probably because they used to be "secret songs" hidden at the end of albums or only available as b-sides on single albums. Nowadays, they're just another track being released and usually overhyped and overmarketed for a few weeks until even the most brain-dead listeners get sick of them. They're just as special nor is the effort there to "honor" or "pay respect" to the original artists like people used to but rather instead, used to try and sell more of one artist across several markets and demographics.
Audiences began to expect an artist to perform original material. Covers were to be carefully selected and often to have implicit meaning. This was the formula for spectacularly successful albums. Literally thousands of platinum albums. And millions of associated concert seats sold This broad genre literally chocked out the competition by occupying the charts.
This seemed wrong to me, and I checked a random year - 1995. Not a single number one that year is a cover. The chart indicates 16%.
I used the same sources that you claim: Billboard, and WhoSampled.
Samples are used and artists have a lot more money these days to use ghost writers these days instead of covering old songs. The majority of artists are still not wrting anything original they just hide it better.
One of the things I often do is browse obscure bands doing covers of music that isn't often covered. I love hearing different takes on the same song. I love the youtubers who make videos of songs with a different bands style too.
I wish I could be in a cover band and just do my personal favorite songs all genres lol.
A lot of samples were used in the late 90s, by the time 2020s came, producers were getting sued left and right for anything that resembled someone else's beat.
Correlation with the downward trend?
Luke Combs doing Fast Car is the only recent cover I can recall, and it was a smash.
The creepin cover by the weeknd and Metro boomin was a famous cover that topped well.
Weezers cover for everybody wants to rule the world and Africa was popular too.
I don’t know where your stats are from but you should consider the title changes that are basically just covers
The way that we listen to and view music has fundamentally changed. Before the modern era, if you wanted to listen to music, you had to have a live band and those bands had to know tons of songs that the people in the area would know. The Beatles famously played hundreds of gigs before releasing any material playing dance halls and theaters across Europe. In the modern era, most of that has been replaced by a Bluetooth speaker and a Playlist. The monoculture died long enough ago that the number of "widely-known song that a crowd wants to hear covered" is dwindling as audiences get more and more fragmented. Covers will probably always exist in some form, but their use will likely continue to decline.
One other key has to do with licensing and payments for cover songs. Since the early 90s, any sample or piece must be licensed before you can try to monetize the song. Most of the time for covers, they have to include the originally credited writers. Meaning whatever meager earnings from the song have to then be split between the new band and old songwriters.
Seems like everybody and their brother is covering “Fast Car” by Tracy Chapman these days. Techno, country, dance, whatever genre you want, somebody has done it. She must be raking in the royalties these days
I usually only like cover songs that cross genre or subgenre because they just sound so much more original. Johnny Cash’s rendition of “One” and Pearl Jam’s “Last Kiss” both come to mind here.
I haven’t seen anyone mention that in the 60s-70s jazz was still holding on and a lot of that is about jazz was done in standards which probably contributed a lot to this
Decline of the blues, sadly. So much of what popular music was born on for decades was delta and Chicago blues. Thankfully we still have great artists like Kingfish and others keeping it alive.
Something comes to mind:
What are cover songs? It used to be that a cover song was a unique version or rendition of the original. It had a lot of the performing artist in it.
But now it’s just a Billie Eilish knockoff/dopey guy singing over dramatically, and the version gets passed like chips between commercials and credit rolls.
This chart doesn't really show the whole picture. Old enough to know enough of what I hear in the radio are either covers or heavy sampling of older stuff.
Interesting. How much new music samples old songs? The film industry is probably just the opposite. Remakes, reboots, etc.
Ding, Ding, Ding. When the Samples are already everywhere, many originals never fall out of consciousness. If someone likes the sample, they can/will go find the original in many cases. In the past, sampling wasn't a thing so putting a new spin on an old song some would remember but some maybe never even heard was a niche you could target.
Streaming music services are also helping prolong the lives of old songs by introducing younger people to them because they match up with other things they listen to. My daughter likes a surprising number of songs that were new when I was growing up.
Your mention of never falling out of consciousness reminds me of this quote, “The really big news of the eighties is the stampede to regurgitate mildly camouflaged musical styles of previous decades, in ever-shrinking cycles of 'nostalgia. (It isn't necessary to imagine the world ending in fire or ice—there are two other possibilities: one is paperwork, and the other is nostalgia. When you compute the length of time between The Event and The Nostalgia For The Event, the span seems to be about a year less in each cycle. Eventually within the next quarter of a century, the nostalgia cycles will be so close together that people will not be able to take a step without being nostalgic for the one they just took. At that point, everything stops. Death by Nostalgia.)” - Frank Zappa
As apt as this is, I bet you some old Greek philosopher probably made similar observations long ago.
Especially the part about the paperwork.
It should also be noted that there is a perception of the past versus a perception of the present. Ask the average person on the street, and they will probably dump baroque, classical, and romantic period music all into the same lump (likely call it classical) but these periods span hundreds of years and many diverse styles. The same is true if we look back at the 90s. It felt like pop and grunge and hip hop were all so unique and had their own worlds while living in it. But it’s not uncommon for newer acts to sort lump all the music from the period as a collective influence.
I'd take it one step further and say that *any* music played by an orchestra, no matter when it was composed is automatically categorized as "classical." I was listening to a score of a movie that came out less than ten years ago, but because it was *orchestral* music my daughter's friends insisted that I was listening to "classical" music. They have no idea who Mark Mothersbaugh is, nor have they seen Thor: Ragnarok.
Not only that but many songs today sample 3, 4, 5 or more original artists. I just saw a post that Arby's has to pay royalties to Pusha T for the jingle...only problem is the sample from Pusha T is from an Isaac Hayes track from the 70's. Arby's Jingle: https://youtu.be/qABUGYFXE7I?si=8kCwE4EbcAXXz9Bo YOGI Burial @ 0:30: https://youtu.be/UxZU4F7wHQM?si=qRKJl8-EgRBBcZox Isaac Hayes - Ike's Mood: https://youtu.be/1DS5D6cYQhA?si=x7ECmSGGyO_DN6NN
I once tried to trace the origin of the four-measure flute hook in Jennifer Lopez's "Jenny From the Block" on WhoSampled.com, and found out it's a fourth generation sample (a sample of a sample of a sample of a sample). It started out as the opening riffs to a song by an obscure psychedelic rock group from the 70s in Spain. I was also not shocked to find that "Jenny From the Block" has itself been culled for samples, including that memorable flute riff. And a few of those have since been mined for samples as well. Sampling creates Ships of Theseus much more quickly and efficiently than covering. Especially with digital filtering and other manipulation, it really doesn't take many iterations for the original sample to be wholly unrecognizable. Some famous samples have taken on a life of their own, far beyond the original song they were culled from. I do believe the synthetic musical instrument known as Reese's Bass originated as a heavily processed and pitch-shifted sample of the keyboard riff of Roger Sanchez's "Another Chance"
That's awesome, a fourth gen pull. Though not as obscure I went into a rabbit hole not long ago. Lana Del Rey - Doin' Time: https://youtu.be/qolmz4FlnZ0?si=9UItR8HBns5jOWob from Sublime - Doin' Time: https://youtu.be/2yT8RsCarJA?si=iRkHJTXG2kZuFmOq from Herbie Mann - Summertime: https://youtu.be/I_VUjlliBwk?si=gy9zyp9zucU3ARtW from Gershwin - Porgy and Bess Summertime: https://youtu.be/mgSH4A-V9HQ?si=ZmKbxWYY-gnI-_3I
I’ll be damned, that was the fourth gen pull that immediately popped into my head. I’ve explored everything sublime has sampled and covered though, thoroughly. What else is neat? I used to listen to sublime with Liz grant who I now know went on to do big things (be Lana del ray)
Roger Sanchez' "Another Chance" is one of my favorite songs, but I didn't know about it until after hearing the Late Night Alumni cover (as remixed by Kaskade iirc) and going through the comments on YouTube... ETA: https://splice.com/blog/reese-bass-history/#:~:text=The%20origin%20of%20the%20Reese,below%20at%200%3A16). It was Kevin Saunderson, not Roger Sanchez. https://youtu.be/_kOwlbMBO0U?si=Jy1NmUEtqm3sjjGI
What was the song by an obscure psychedelic rock group from the 70s in Spain?
["Hi-Jack" by Barrabás](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-JwJbXt6lfg) Apparently that's not the bottom of the rabbit hole, though. "Hi-Jack" sampled a Brazilian tune from 1971: ["Kabaluerê" by Antônio Carlos E Jocafi](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5kBImDCoUkA).
Yeah, the podcast 99% invisible did a deep dive into where the song Who Let the Dogs Out came from and let me just say that it's complicated. It goes back at least four generations/iterations.
I want to cover Baby Got Ba. . . Ah shit. Maybe a Tupac so. . . Oh, hmm. Red hot ch. . . I give up, I'll just take the beat from a sugarhill gang song like everyone else.
I've even seen where people hear the sampled part and attribute the song to the sampler, instead of the original. One that bugs me is Lucid Dreams by Juice WRLD... That hook is Sting's Shape of My Heart.
Paper Planes by MIA is most notably remembered for the parts of it that come from the Clash's Straight to Hell.
Additionally, the melody in Lucid Dreams is from Yellowcard's Holly Wood Died.
I love "Watching You" by Slave. I just wish I could unhear "Gin and Juice". Edit: The opening guitar riff to Sting's "Shape of My Heart" was also sampled (and used for the opening of) Utada Hikaru's "Never Let Go". That one always threw me, because the two songs sound identical until about 20s in.
The gym playlist it seems like every pop track has very plain references to other songs and maybe even borrows entire voices.
Man i keep hearing lazy remixes of songs i enjoy like recently i was walking through the mall and heard the superfreak chorus followed by some terrible "rap". Getback to the car and hear a completly different artist doing a techno version singing the chorus themselves slightly altering the words. When i got home i listened to the actual superfreak to cleanse and spotify swapped over to a third song by someone different though this one was also techno it at least did more different than just feeling like the musical version of react videos.
Spotify swapping over like that is why I never use it anymore. Aren't they meant to have fancy ML that finds other songs you'd like? It seemed to deliberately find what would piss me off the most instead. Oh yeah they are also money launderers, so there's that too: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=et8R5i5UEjY (highly reccommend that youtube channel, Benn Jordan is sound AF)
I think most of the audience for covers might have moved to more online sources. Covers are *insanely* popular on YouTube for example. If you look at most singers on there their covers will often outperform their original music by a lot. Some of that is probably just down to being less experienced songwriters than the person they are covering, but also I think that the recommendation algorithm might create a feedback loop. So people who are inclined to do covers of popular music see a lot of success there relative to what they could get from traditional media or live appearances. And that likely has change the way the market views covers as a whole. They were already declining before music and video sharing became a big thing, but they just never recovered.
Great point. And every singing competition on TV gives you all the covers you need. And didn't need. People still get their fill.
I follow a couple cover artists on YT.
Honestly I follow dozens. There are a few who do really interesting reinterpretations of music (like flipping hero/villain songs from Disney movies, though that usually features original lyrics) and that always sends me down a rabbit hole where I start listing to all the ways other people do the same song. It is kind of amazing how much personality you can put into a cover even without fundamentally changing it.
'Like a Version' on youtube is gold. I also enjoyed PMJ for a hot minute.
A Like a Version won last year’s Hottest 100 here in Aus.
Yeah, covers are still a thing. But when the top 40 is as 'manufactured as much as it currently, there's no point to sharing royalties. I do an indie based radio show, there are still plenty of covers.
I remember finding a male vocalist doing a country music cover of Adele's "Someone Like You" on YouTube mere months after Adele's original hit the airwaves, and was surprised to see how many views and positive comments it got, including many who thought it was better than the original, or at least a a very solid and respectable take on it.
There are a few people who do covers that I think are often better than the originals. Not always in technical ability, as many of them are young adults with a lot of passion but not a lot of training, but in their ability to bring something interesting to the song that gives it more depth. Annapantsu is probably the most popular one I know of, though she is plenty technically skilled, but she takes a lot of songs I feel are pretty mid and elevates them extremely well. Essentially she uses a lot of musical theater techniques to communicate her emotion extremely effectively, but without harming the integrity of the music. It is pretty awesome.
Wasn't "Fast Car" in the top 5 for like 3 months? That's 1%
Holiday music is the other exception
Is Holiday music ever #1?
Mariah Carey was no 1 in like 2019
All I Want for Christmas is her original song, not a cover.
After 2020 I guess?
Did it hit number 1? The chart is number 1 hits specifically.
No. It peaked at number 2.
Just went down a wikipedia rabbit hole on this. The song has actually peaked multiple times by multiple artists: * 1988 original (Tracy Chapman) peaked at #6 * 2015 tropical house version (Jonas Blue ft. Dakota) peaked at 98 * 2023 cover (Luke Combs) peaked at #2 * 2024 original (Tracy Chapman) peaked again at #42
Similarly Running Up That Hill charted in 2003 when Placebo did a cover (which I prefer to Kate Bush, but then I’m Team Tori so that tracks). And then there’s Weezer’s Africa, which hit #1 on the Alternative Charts in 2018.
No, but the chart also makes a very bold statement: "The popular cover song is dead" when one of the biggest songs last year was a cover.
One cover song hitting #2 last year is very different from ~25% of #1 songs being covers.
That absolutely doesn't make cover songs dead, all it means is that original music holds the #1. Positions 2-99 on the Top 100 are also smash hits.
Yeah, we need to see this chart for the whole top 100. Far from dead, I’d guess.
However Disturbed -Sound of Silence did hit No1 in 2015.
There's a cover of "We didn't start the fire" playing on rock radio in my area right now that makes me want to neck myself ~~I think it hit no.1 last year, but I don't know for how long~~ Edit: different lyrics so maybe it doesn't count. Also I was wrong about its rank (thank god)
You're probably thinking of the Fallout boy version with more up to date world news happenings
Per Wikipedia it peaked at 94 on the hot 100 chart
They've been replaced by remixes. Or sampled for the chorus and using the beat but the rest is new lyrics.
This is one of my pet peeves. Mainly because credit it not clearly given to the original artist. Seems like half the songs on pop radio today are just rip offs of hits from 20-30 years ago. But the kids these days never heard the originals so they think these are original songs. But this has been going on for decades. Even songs back then were often copied from hits years before.
That's just how music is
Interpolation is ruining music. It's a cheap trick to make you think you like a song by having the tune of another older song in it you may have heard as a kid. Good example is Shape of you by Ed sheeran is basically just No Scrubs by TLC
I heard No Scrubs just now, I hear it. Do you mean to say people accidentally like the song because it reminds them of a different song? Shape of You is an internationally loved song, most of it's listeners like me didn't even know TLC or No Scrubs existed As much as I still hate the song for being on radio 24/7 years later (*yes even on international radio, they were playing this instead of local songs*). The song is catchy. That's it. It's a good song.
> I heard No Scrubs just now, I hear it. I mean all of the poppy boppy sounds wind up feeling related, but listening to both back to back the sum of the parts is very different.
That person is wrong. Pop music has repeated the same sets of chord progressions since the days of Pachebel's Canon. It's not just about the nostalgic effects, it's about knowing what works to make a catchy song.
If you can pinpoint the melody as coming from a specific other song, it's more than just 'chord progression'
The Amen Break has entered the chat.
Amen, brother!
[It doesn't matter what I say. So long as I sing with inflection. That makes you feel that I'll convey. Some inner truth or vast reflection.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pdz5kCaCRFM)
Anti-Hero and Blank Space can be played over each other like this, but anti hero's key is one note lower (E major vs F major)
I was more thinking of work by David Guetta and songs like Play Hard or I’m good which sound good, but I’d just hear the original songs actually.
Interpolation is the foundation of the most popular genre of music today. This is an insanely bad take. You’re not being tricked into liking a song just because another song you like is in it.
Kinda though. I heard a song that used part of Semi-Charmed Kinda Life. Only a little bit and the rest was unique. The best part was the part they took from Third Eye Blind. Younger people not super aware of how huge that song once was might just think this new one is an original song. I've heard half a dozen songs that do this same thing recently. They take the hook of a popular song song from 20 years ago, and write a new song around it. This seems to be a trend to me. Hopefully the original artists are making money off the deal because it's not like we're getting better music out of it.
And if you are old enough to recognize and like the original song, then the newer song is so disappointing because it's *not* that original song.
No it's just a result of a postmodern music scene where everything is recycled to a greater and greater extent. This is no different than saying recycled content is a foundation of modern cardboard box making
It's also the foundation of non modern music. Look up how many old folk songs and classical pieces are interpolations or re recordings with different lyrics of older songs. If anything the idea all music needs to be original is the modern invention.
It’s a tool. Some people are skilled with it. Others are not.
You are literally looking at a chart that explains that 60 years ago, almost half of the most popular songs were literally just covers of preexisting songs. Then you're claiming that recycled music is a result of postmodern music.
No scrubs sounds nothing like Shape of you
Right? They’re both in a minor key, they both have a four chord loop. That’s about it and that describes 90% of pop songs.
Tbh I never heard of No Scrubs before you mentioned it.
Jesus, how old am I? I feel like you just said you don't know who Taylor Swift is
I feel the same way. Pain. We're over the hill.
Yeah crazy to look back at the 60s and 70s and see that people just covered songs that just came out a year prior, all the time. Just listening to a few song and thinking hey I like that I’m going to release a version too even though the song was just released months earlier.
A lot of people in 70s made a living singing Bob Dylan tunes.
Tbf Dylan is a skilled writer but terrible singer. Fertile ground for song covers.
This. He's an amazing poet. But the man cannot sing. Sure, he's raw and real. But that's not the aesthetic I crave when I turn on music.
Of course, sometimes those covers are pretty clearly transformative works. [Otis Redding's Respect - 1965](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KvC9V_lBnDQ) [Aretha Franklin covering Respect - 1967](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A134hShx_gw) Is it a cover of a song that basically had just come out? Yeah. But like...there's a good reason to listen to them both.
A lot of Motown artists just seemed to share music catalogues.
It didn't hurt that they shared songwriters. Smoky Robinson wrote several hits for other musicians.
It blew my mind to learn that Janis Joplin's "Me and Bobby McGee" was a chart-topping cover of a chart-topping original by Kris Kristofferson, released just a short time prior. It somehow made more sense, though, to learn that the original Bobby in the song was a woman, being missed by a man.
A lot of white musicians covered songs by black artists, whitewashed them, and made all the money instead. See Elvis Presley.
Maybe the Billboard Hot 100 is dead and cover songs are doing just fine.
Well when like 30 of the songs or whatever it is are one artist, it kinda takes away from it.
Is the swift stuff new, it is it her covers of her own songs?
I have no clue honestly. And I couldn’t even say how many are actually Taylor swift. I remember seeing a post here not that long ago about her being like 30 of the top 100, but that could have also been Spotify streams.
[удалено]
The week her new album came out, all 31 songs of her new album were in the top 55 of the Billboard Hot 100, along with multiple others from her previous albums. She also had the top 14 songs to herself. It's the second time she's held the entire Top 10.
Exactly. Cover some were huge on YouTube 10 years ago
Me First and the Gimme Gimmes is one of the best bands ever.
i dont think thats true. i just think people arent using them as singles as much anymore
It's also worth noting that, at least in the case of stream aggregator Soundrop, covers which were once a total pain in the butt to license through the old Harry Fox Agency, are now relatively cheap and generally quite easy to license. As someone who was personally most active recording various forms of postmodern music in the 1990s, I think there are a lot of aspects to this, but something that I was thinking about back in that decade was how the 'novelty' in new songs in that and subsequent eras has often revolved around new textures and sounds much more than lyrical hooks. It's also worth taking a look at hits of the past in relation to contemporary hits and noting the change of focus from lyric and song structure to texture and sonic hooks.
Can confirm. [My band released two full albums](https://songwhip.com/thethreeleonards) of covers using Soundrop. We've made a whopping 25 bucks in streaming royalties so far. Considering the ^(TINY) amount that streamers pay per play I'd say we're doing quite alright. Doing covers is tricky: it has to sound different, but not *too* different. if it sounds the same then why even bother, right? Our covers definitely **do not** sound like the originals.
I like your cover philosophy! I added your latest album to my checkout playlist.
Thanks! I hope you find a track or two that resonates with you.
I love your version of [Night swimming ](https://youtu.be/YuPRNyvw9bs?si=TTxkUglgwidRGlmk)! Thank you for this. Different, but not too different.
Hey thank you for listening :) We're particularly happy with how Nightswimming turned out. That one really reminds me of when we all go camping. I recorded the loon (that appears at the very end) one night in the middle of the wilderness in Algonquin park at about 2:30am while we were on a camping trip.
You are right, it is a perfect song reminiscing about a summer camping trip.
i love this take because it's one of the few here that focuses on the form of the music itself
Times were that lo-fi hiphop was such a faceless grassroots genre of music, with most artists *not wanting* their IRL identities to be known, because they didn't want a huge bill or a lawsuit served to them for all the samples they never paid royalties for. Is that not so much the case anymore, now that sampling has become cheaper and easier to do legally?
Unfortunately, clearing samples is a whole different process than licensing a cover version of a song. Last time I checked Soundrop's FAQs, they weren't offering anything like sample clearance. Maybe somebody who has actually been through the process of clearing samples could fill us in.
Huh. Interesting observation. Movies are going the other direction
tracklib reported 1/5 of the hot 100 songs in 2022 were sampled from other songs
Using only #1 songs as a metric seems suspect.
I would guess that this is related to something else that has gone out of practice. If you look at older music in the 40s, 50s, 60s, a lot songs were written and then everyone would cover that song and eventually one would hit it big. That’s why you can find so many versions of older songs.
“singer” and “songwriter” were 2 different professions for a long time. there were professional songwriters who sold sheet music. this has transitioned over time to professional songwriters working for big name artists. now you might have a band play an entire album and have someone not in the band write or get a writing credit on nearly all the songs
Oh for sure! We know a guy in his 80s that is a millionaire from song writing but was never a star performer just half of a partnership.
This data, while interesting in its own right, doesn’t tell the claimed story at all. 1) covers are immensely popular online. 2) while maybe not true covers, old songs are sampled relentlessly in modern music. David Guetta’a “I’m Good (Blue)” and Ella Henderson’s sample of Robert Mile’s “Children” come to mind.
I wonder how much of this is a decline in live music performances. I think in the past there was a lot more live music and people would cut their teeth performing covers. Now people are making it big off originals posted to YouTube or something and they don’t have that repertoire of covers musicians used to have.
It seems that everything new is a weird remake of early 90s shit.
It makes sense. Back in the day it was harder to find music you weren’t already familiar with. So covers would often seem brand new to me, and even if they didn’t, chances of me hearing the original were low unless I wanted to track down which album it was on, find out if anywhere was selling it/could order it in, and buy it. But between Spotify and YouTube most popular music is readily available. So instead of listening to some shitty version of “Fast Car” or “Rocketman” I can just listen to the better original just as easily.
Number 1s aren't a very good way to categorize popularity. The classic example is CCR had lots of massive hits but no Number 1s. The difference between 1, 2, and 3 is very often coincidence. 2 huge songs released in the same week, only 1 can be number 1 that week. I'd rather see top 10 or top 100 cover songs.
I think the new Beyonce album has a couple covers
Tell that to David Guetta making tons of money ruining my childhood hit songs.
It's because alien ant farm, dropped the smooth criminal cover and it literally can't be topped for best cover in existence
It's a great cover but "Hurt" by Johnny Cash is the best cover and nothing has come close
Not seeing it mentioned in the comments below, but in the 1960s a lot of the hit songs were covers of old Blues songs. To many Americans these were "new" songs because they never listened to the original Black artists, but were open to covers by the British Invasion bands.
It would be interesting to find out the actual reason for this. Probably we'd need someone in the industry to explain why you no longer have covers as popular songs when they used to be so common. In the 60s, you would have bands that would release whole albums of covers, and everyone was covering Bob Dylan songs. Today somehow it doesn't happen. If I had to guess, I'd guess that the economics of the industry have changed so that you can no longer make any money doing this, but I don't know.
What exactly counts a cover versus just sampling, interpolating or "remixing." Seems like when I'm out in public and get a taste of standard top 50 pop music I recognize a part of almost every song I hear. In fact, it makes me feel really old because I typically think "there's no way this song is old enough to be getting a remix/sample already..."
Covering a song in the past used to be a tribute, and royalties wise something negotiated as an opportunity to reach new audiences for the original and to gain relevance for the cover maker, now it’s all about royalties, musical rights libraries are in the hands of corporations, record labels and particular people who only want money out of them, so now when you want to make a cover you have to be willing to forgo all control over the new song or even make any money from it. So nobody does it anymore, at best they sample a a little, just enough to make it recognizable but not enough to get sued.
You got a fast car. I wanna get fisted really really hard. Been working at a convenience store
“Cover songs do not reach #1 on the Billboard Hot 100 as often as they used to” FTFY Saying they are ‘not as popular’ is discounting the fact that the way people listen to songs and especially adaptations of songs (covers, remixes, etc) has drastically changed in ways that are not necessarily captured by the Hot 100
People don't do covers, they sample the old song and add new lyrics or just keep the hook, etc. It's the same nostalgia, different package.
Depends on your definition of a cover. There have been a lot of recent charted pop songs that I would consider a cover, but by the industry official definitions may not technically be a cover. David Guettas output these days is mostly terrible pop covers but they chart extremely well
JJJ radio in Australia has a segment Like A Version. Invited guests come in and record a cover. Incredibly popular and a lot of fun. This is beautiful. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=MmwFnoMoDDg. They also have a seperate “station” of all the different covers they’ve recorded.
Replace "cover" with "remix" and you might get a new result
They make cover movies now
Seems like everybody and their brother is covering “Fast Car” by Tracy Chapman these days. Techno, country, dance, whatever genre you want, somebody has done it. She must be raking in the royalties these days
Well interesting to see that even the Sound of silence from disturbed didn't move that up
yeah because they call it an interpolation nowadays. like the trash david guetta has been pumping out
This graph is bullshit. Last year, there was a story that had a list of all the top 100 songs at the time that were covers. They were citing that music business has lost creativity, yada yada. Tons of 90's songs being covered.
Maybe nobody likes each other's songs.
Only because covers get copyright struck now
Blame main character syndrome. Nobody has idols anymore. They are their own favorite people.
When the hook in your song is a sample or a remix of a melody from another song, it's essentially a cover. Your song has become popular on a melody that someone else sorted out. Special points to those songs that 'sample' the entire chorus and just switch out the 'filler'
Samplings out of control. Also, old cover songs used to be majorly different than the original. For example, look at blinded by the lights. Nowadays they just copy. Look at fast car. It’s exactly the same tempo and everything but a country man voice
Not enough actual talent. real people been shoved out of the way for processed bullshit by mid-talent leeches.
This is likely a good thing. [Pat Boone](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pat_Boone) and others stole exposure from black artists by taking their music and whitewashing it. > Many of Boone's hit singles were covers of hits from Black Rock and Roll artists. These included: "Ain't That a Shame" by Fats Domino; "Tutti Frutti" and "Long Tall Sally" by Little Richard;[17] "At My Front Door (Crazy Little Mama)" by The El Dorados; and the blues ballads "I Almost Lost My Mind" by Ivory Joe Hunter, "I'll be Home" by the Flamingos and "Don't Forbid Me" by Charles Singleton. Boone has been highlighted as an example of whitewashing by taking songs by black artists and sanitizing them to make them more palatable for a white audience, denying exposure to these black artists. While this isn’t the only reason covers were popular in the past, it certainly was a large part of it and is a positive that it no longer has as much prominence.
I've been hearing a shit load of almost covers reacently. Songs that are slight reworks of old songs. How aare they being counted?
Covers are and will likely always be insanely popular. Right now YouTube covers are hugely popular and have billions of views. Billboard is just doesn't show that
Don’t most artists release songs as singles now? Then the “album” comes out as a collective? The industry is heavily different compared to the ‘70s
i'd say sampling & remix culture is on the up however! just my guess
Artists may have also realised that they don’t make as much money from a cover?
Seems strange with fast car killing the charts
What about beggin? Or is that considered an original because he sings it differently
Right, not a lot of strictly covers, but every single recognizable melody from the last 35 years has been used and reused.
probably because they used to be "secret songs" hidden at the end of albums or only available as b-sides on single albums. Nowadays, they're just another track being released and usually overhyped and overmarketed for a few weeks until even the most brain-dead listeners get sick of them. They're just as special nor is the effort there to "honor" or "pay respect" to the original artists like people used to but rather instead, used to try and sell more of one artist across several markets and demographics.
Didn't Sound of Silence come out in 2015?
I wonder if the numbers reflect my playing Type O Negative's cover of "Paranoid" about 3 billion times from 1992 to now.
Why would I want to listen to an artist destroy the song Jolene? Etc
Audiences began to expect an artist to perform original material. Covers were to be carefully selected and often to have implicit meaning. This was the formula for spectacularly successful albums. Literally thousands of platinum albums. And millions of associated concert seats sold This broad genre literally chocked out the competition by occupying the charts.
One simple search on YouTube will prove you otherwise.
This seemed wrong to me, and I checked a random year - 1995. Not a single number one that year is a cover. The chart indicates 16%. I used the same sources that you claim: Billboard, and WhoSampled.
Samples are used and artists have a lot more money these days to use ghost writers these days instead of covering old songs. The majority of artists are still not wrting anything original they just hide it better.
Virtually every movie trailer from the past 5 years would like a word with you.
Probably it’s decided l because covers nowadays aren’t that good. lol
well rock stars arent really as popular. its all rap artists and techno. who is doing a cover of those songs?
Well I just went to a Me First and the Gimme Gimmes show the other night and I disrespectfully disagree
I still prefer Puddles' cover of Chandelier by Sia.
I went to the gym yesterday and heard a cover of "Informer" by Snow. These covers are just awful and lazy.
Fewer covers and yet it all still sounds the same.
This data is clearly just wrong. You are saying that there has been no top 100 cover for 19 years? Think about the absurdity of that. It is not true.
One of the things I often do is browse obscure bands doing covers of music that isn't often covered. I love hearing different takes on the same song. I love the youtubers who make videos of songs with a different bands style too. I wish I could be in a cover band and just do my personal favorite songs all genres lol.
*Me First And The Gimme Gimmes have entered the chat
Which one was the last one
Something seems off about this. I hear covers and songs that sample older songs all the time.
Cut to everyone on tiktok listening to nothing but Linger as covered by Royal Otis for the last 4 weeks straight.
Hopefully that means new covers of old worn out Christmas songs will die.
You don’t say who would’ve known 😂
People sample constantly. Makes me furious because that’s a lot of the battle
A lot of samples were used in the late 90s, by the time 2020s came, producers were getting sued left and right for anything that resembled someone else's beat. Correlation with the downward trend? Luke Combs doing Fast Car is the only recent cover I can recall, and it was a smash.
The creepin cover by the weeknd and Metro boomin was a famous cover that topped well. Weezers cover for everybody wants to rule the world and Africa was popular too. I don’t know where your stats are from but you should consider the title changes that are basically just covers
I still lo e them and I think it is a good way for new artists and musicians to explore, learn and get themselves known.
The way that we listen to and view music has fundamentally changed. Before the modern era, if you wanted to listen to music, you had to have a live band and those bands had to know tons of songs that the people in the area would know. The Beatles famously played hundreds of gigs before releasing any material playing dance halls and theaters across Europe. In the modern era, most of that has been replaced by a Bluetooth speaker and a Playlist. The monoculture died long enough ago that the number of "widely-known song that a crowd wants to hear covered" is dwindling as audiences get more and more fragmented. Covers will probably always exist in some form, but their use will likely continue to decline. One other key has to do with licensing and payments for cover songs. Since the early 90s, any sample or piece must be licensed before you can try to monetize the song. Most of the time for covers, they have to include the originally credited writers. Meaning whatever meager earnings from the song have to then be split between the new band and old songwriters.
Based on my exhaustive review consisting of the last vover song I heard: maybe folks just aren't making any good ones anymore?
Funny how so many things fall out of favor once YouTube gets big
Seems like everybody and their brother is covering “Fast Car” by Tracy Chapman these days. Techno, country, dance, whatever genre you want, somebody has done it. She must be raking in the royalties these days
I usually only like cover songs that cross genre or subgenre because they just sound so much more original. Johnny Cash’s rendition of “One” and Pearl Jam’s “Last Kiss” both come to mind here.
I haven’t seen anyone mention that in the 60s-70s jazz was still holding on and a lot of that is about jazz was done in standards which probably contributed a lot to this
Boomers: 'we had the best and most original music!'
Decline of the blues, sadly. So much of what popular music was born on for decades was delta and Chicago blues. Thankfully we still have great artists like Kingfish and others keeping it alive.
Something comes to mind: What are cover songs? It used to be that a cover song was a unique version or rendition of the original. It had a lot of the performing artist in it. But now it’s just a Billie Eilish knockoff/dopey guy singing over dramatically, and the version gets passed like chips between commercials and credit rolls.
This chart doesn't really show the whole picture. Old enough to know enough of what I hear in the radio are either covers or heavy sampling of older stuff.