There's an whole genre of musicians focusing only on creating royalty free covers of popular songs so the music can be used in suggestive ways while avoiding royalties.

It's not art. It's parasitism of art.

> There's an whole genre of musicians focusing only on creating royalty free covers

There is no such thing as a “royalty free cover”. Either it is a full on faithful cover, which you can perform as long as license fees are paid, and in which case both the performer and the original songwriter get royalties, or it is a “transformative cover” which requires negotiation with the publisher/rights owner (and in that case IP ownership will probably be split between songwriter and performer depending on their agreement).

(Not an IP lawyer myself so someone can correct me.)

Furthermore, in countries where I know how it works as a venue owner you pay the rights organization a fixed sum per month or year and you are good to go and play any track you want. It thus makes no difference to you whether you play the original or a cover.

Have you considered that it is simply singers-performers who like to sing and would like to earn a bit of money from it, but don’t have many original songs if their own?

> It's parasitism of art

If we assume covers are parasitism of art, by that logic would your comment, which is very similar to dozens I have seen on this topic in recent months, be parasitism of discourse?

Jokes aside, a significant number of covers I have heard at cafes over years are actually quite decent, and I would certainly not call that parasitic in any way.

Even pretending they were, if you compare between artists specialising in covers and big tech trying to expropriate IP, insert itself as a middleman and arbiter for information access, devalue art for profit, etc., I am not sure they are even close in terms of the scale of parasitism.

> Have you considered that it is simply singers-performers who like to sing and would like to earn a bit of money from it, but don’t have many original songs if their own?

Or, maybe you start to pay attention?

They are selling their songs cheaper for TV, radio or ads.

> Even pretending they were, if you compare between artists specialising in covers and big tech trying to expropriate IP

They're literally working for spotify.

> They are selling their songs cheaper for TV, radio or ads.

I guess that somehow refutes the points I made, but I can’t see how.

Radio stations, like the aforementioned venue owners, pay the rights organizations a flat annual fee. TV programs do need to license these songs (as unlike simple cover here the use is substantially transformative), and covers can be easier to license, but again: the original songwriter gets royalties for performance of covers, and often a cover is a specifically considered and selected choice: it can be miles better fitting for a scene than the original (just consider Motion Picture Soundtrack in that Westworld scene), and unlike the original it does not make the scene about itself as much. I am just not seeing what you are so on edge about.

I know of restaurants and bars that choose to play cover versions of well-known songs because the costs are so much less.

I really doubt you would ever license any specific songs as a cafe business. You should be able to pay a fixed fee to a PRO and have a blanket license to play almost anything. Is it so expensive in the US, or perhaps they do not know that this is an option? If the former, and those cover artists help those bars keep their expenses low and offer you better experience while charging less—working with the system, without ripping off the original artists who still get paid their royalty—does it seem particularly parasitic?

The example I was referring to was not in the US.

A restaurant / cafe may pay a fixed fee and get access to a specific catalog of songs (performances). The fee depends on what the catalog contains. As you can imagine, paying for the right to only play instrumental versions of songs (no singers, no lyrics) is significantly cheaper. Or, having performances of songs by unknown people.

Two countries where I know how it works from a venue business owner perspective work this way. The fees seemed pretty mild, that’s why I asked if it’s too expensive in your country (which I guess is not US).

There's several sides of music copyright:

1. The lyrics

2. The composition

3. The recording

These can all be owned by different people or the same person. The "royalty free covers" you mention are people abusing the rights of one of those. They're not avoiding royalties, they just havn't been caught yet.

I believe performance of a cover still results in relevant royalties paid to the original songwriter, just sans the performance fee, which does not strike me as a terrible ripoff (after all, a cover did take effort to arrange and perform).

What this person is talking about is they write “tvinkle tvinkle ittle stawr” instead of the real lyrics (basically just writing the words phonetically and/or misspelled) to try and bypass the law through “technicalities” that wouldn’t stand up in court.

I doubt so for a few reasons based on how they described this alleged parasitic activity, but mainly because the commenter alluded to Spotify doing this. Would be very surprising if they decided to do something so blatantly illegal, when they could keep extracting money by the truckload with their regular shady shenanigans that do not cross that legality line so obviously.

Regarding what you described, I don’t think I encountered this in the wild enough to remember. IANAL but if not cleared/registered properly as a cover it doesn’t seem to be a workaround or abuse, but would probably be found straight up illegal if the rights holder or relevant rights organization cares to sue. In this case, all I can say is “yes, some people do illegal stuff”. The system largely works.