Earn Money from Cover Songs!

I put out a video a couple weeks ago about how it’s a good idea to incorporate cover songs in your repertoire to grow an audience. If you missed that you can watch here.

And I want to double down on that just a little bit.

You can potentially be an overnight success by covering one song, without using any type of professional recording equipment.

All you need is a cell phone, a popular song, and a little creativity.

Here’s a few tips to follow on choosing the right song to cover:

1. Pick a current popular song, but not one that is being over covered like a brand new Taylor Swift single.
2. Seasonal songs like Christmas, Halloween, New Years, etc. Obviously you would want to release this within the appropriate season.
3. Pick a song you can do a 180° on. Turn a heavy rock song into an acoustic production or an americana style song into a heavy produced track. This catches an audience’s attention.
4. Tag the original artist and hashtag them and the song. These artists have a social media team that follows all of their tags and hashtags and so do their fans.

When you’re ready, it’s time to release that content in the most effective way possible. This is when a little research and intuition comes in handy.

You will want to upload your performance to a popular social media platform with optimal algorithms . Right now that is TikTok.

But wait! First, upload that entire performance of the cover song you chose to YouTube. YouTube is still the #1 platform for highest volume of free exposure.

Then, upload a portion of that performance to all of the social media platforms. Yes, all of them.

Really promote your new cover song performance. You can even earn royalties from releasing your cover song on music streaming platforms such as Apple Music, Amazon Music, and Spotify.

Make sure you watch the video on how to do that with DistroKid and get a DISCOUNT when using the special VIP link that I provide.

I can't wait to hear what you come up with, so let me know if you have a cover song out to share!

- Emily