Item — HN Reader

> The Beatles, Elvis, even Dylan played a lot of covers of old blues tunes or other songs that had been lost by that current generation and were made popular again.

> I don't see a lot of Beatles songs being sampled, because it costs a lot

These are two different things, from a legal and licensing standpoint. My understanding is that sampling (expensive, no set pricing) and covering (set pricing) are distinct. I think that if you cover a song, you agree to credit the original person as writer and pay them an (industry standard) fraction of the royalties. But sampling requires negotiation for usage rights and can get expensive quite quickly. I suspect people are not sampling the Beatles because it would be expensive, but that's a distinct question from that of whether people are covering the Beatles.

I was curious, and it seems Beatles songs are pretty widely covered: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cover_versions_of_Beat...

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For a cover you need a mechanical license https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mechanical_license In the US under the compulsory license scheme, it's a fixed fee per copy or stream (with a minimum licensing fee). It's been a long time since I've looked into this (in the pre-streaming era) but back in those days it was around $.30 per copy. In the US, this is mostly handled through the Harry Fox Agency. I just peaked at their pricing page and there's a lot more categories than their were back in the 90s. https://www.harryfox.com/#/rate-charts

Interesting that the per-copy fee for "Ringtones" (24¢) is much higher than the fee for "Permanent Digital Downloads" (9.1¢).

IIRC, personal, non-commercial "public performances" of recordings as mere ringtones are exempt from public performance royalties under US law, so there appear to be no material additional rights granted by a ringtone sale vs. an ordinary digital download.

So I guess what the extra 14.9¢ buys you is the right to automatically insert the recording into the purchaser's mobile phone's "ringtone" list?

Curious.