November 3, 1992. Whitney Houston releases “I Will Always Love You”, a pop ballad for the film The Bodyguard; the soundtrack and the single ship on the same day. The song will sit at number one on the Billboard Hot 100 for fourteen weeks, earn a diamond RIAA certification, top the charts of 34 countries and sell more than 25 million copies - the year's best-seller and the biggest-selling single by a female solo artist in history. But Houston neither wrote nor first recorded it. Dolly Parton did, in 1973, at RCA Studio B in Nashville, as a country single. That is a cover: a new phonogram of someone else's song. The line between a cover, a remix, a tribute and a minus track is not a matter of mood - it runs through what exactly gets re-recorded, whose recording is used and who gets paid.
What a cover is: you re-record the song, not the record
A cover version is a new performance of an existing song by someone other than the original performer. The term “cover version” settled in by the mid-1940s, and it entered the Russian-language press in the 1990s, through Ogonyok and Argumenty i Fakty. Originally the word had an aggressive meaning: a cover version was a rival version of a hit that a label released alongside the original to poach demand. Paul Williams' 1949 “The Hucklebuck” and Hank Williams' 1952 “Jambalaya” each spawned dozens of competing covers from different labels.
The crucial point in the definition: a cover deals with the song (the composition), not with a particular recording. The performer re-records the vocal, the accompaniment, the arrangement and ends up with their own sound recording. In the United States the right to record someone else's already-released song has existed since the Copyright Act of 1909. It is handled by a mechanical license: a standard royalty is paid to the writer through agencies such as the Harry Fox Agency, and the composer cannot refuse a license for a new recording.
The one thing a composer does control is who releases the first recording of a song. Bob Dylan, for instance, refused his own record company the right to release a live “Mr. Tambourine Man”, using exactly that rule. In 2021 the Music Modernization Act established the MLC, a non-profit body to administer blanket mechanical licensing on digital platforms. Live performances of other people's songs are licensed separately, through performing-rights organisations such as ASCAP and BMI.
Another lever a composer holds is publishing rights. When Elvis Presley wanted to record “I Will Always Love You”, his manager, Colonel Tom Parker, demanded that Parton sign over half of the publishing - by the Presley label's procedure, writers gave up half the publishing for the right to be recorded. Parton refused, and Elvis never cut the song. She later recalled that Houston's version brought her enough to “buy Graceland”.
“I said, 'I'm really sorry,' and I cried all night. … I said, 'I can't do that. Something in my heart says, 'Don't do that.' And I just didn't do it… He would have killed it. But anyway, so he didn't. Then when Whitney came out, I made enough money to buy Graceland”.
- Dolly Parton, on turning Elvis down
Detail: this is exactly why a cover can out-fame the original - Houston owns her own phonogram and needs no permission from Parton to re-record, only the mechanical royalty. But Parton, as composer, collects on every copy of Houston's version.
A remix: the same phonogram, reassembled
A remix is a change to an already existing recording: parts of the phonogram are added, removed or rearranged to build a new version of the same track. The key difference from a cover is that a remix works with the source phonogram rather than re-recording the song from scratch. The encyclopaedia puts it directly: a remix recombines audio from the recording, whereas a cover is a re-recording of someone else's song.
From that follows the legal split. Because a remix uses someone else's sound recording, it is made either by the rights holders themselves or by specialists on the rights holders' order. There is no compulsory mechanical license for the master - a separate clearance from the phonogram's owner is required. This also explains the practice around backing tracks: commercial minus tracks are often re-cut with session musicians, because the rights to the original performance of a famous band are simply too expensive - it is cheaper to re-record.
From Jamaican dub to the 12-inch single
The modern remix grew out of Jamaican dub culture of the late 1960s and early 1970s. Engineers such as King Tubby and Lee “Scratch” Perry broke reggae tracks down to stems, cut the vocal, added echo and delay and put out instrumental “versions”. In the mid-1970s the same trick crossed into disco: Tom Moulton invented the dance remix, the breakdown and the 12-inch single, and Walter Gibbons cut a dance version of Double Exposure's “Ten Percent” - the first commercial 12-inch single, on Salsoul Records. Gibbons, notably, did not mix the record; he made a re-edit of the original mix.
The Salsoul catalogue - Moulton, Gibbons, Jim Burgess, Tee Scott, later Larry Levan and Shep Pettibone - was later called the “canon” of disco remixing, especially in Britain and Europe. Hip-hop picked up the baton: Coldcut's remix of Eric B. & Rakim's “Paid in Full”, released in October 1987 as “Seven Minutes of Madness”, made the top 15 in Germany, the Netherlands and the UK and is regarded as a benchmark. Examples of different versions appear in the Italo Disco remix guide.
A tribute: an album of covers of one artist
A tribute album is a collection made entirely of cover versions of the songs of one performer or group; the word tribute translates as “homage”. Legally each track on it is an ordinary cover with its own mechanical license, so the format is editorial rather than legal. Tribute bands go further: they recreate one artist's music as faithfully as possible - Björn Again play ABBA, The Fab Four play the Beatles. That is no longer a studio cover but a live practice, licensed like a live performance.
On Russian material the tribute format is visible in the “KINOproby” project, recorded in 2000, ten years after Viktor Tsoi's death: rock musicians from Russia and the post-Soviet space covered his songs, and the “Dedicated to Viktor Tsoi” concert was held on 17 November 2000 at Moscow's SC Olimpiysky and on 19 November at the St Petersburg Ice Palace. Inside the tribute, language transfer was pushed to the limit: “Sunny Days” was cut in Russian, Ukrainian and French at once - all three sat on Tsoi's music - and the album also included a single three-language version. The project later grew sequels - “KINOproby. Rap Tribute” (2010), “Save the World. Tribute to Tsoy 2014” and “We Came Out of KINO” (2017). For a concrete example, see Disco Magic’s cover of Masterboy’s Feel the Fire.
A minus and a minusovka: a phonogram without the voice
A minus track (minusovka) is a recording of a musical work in which one or more parts are absent; the name comes from “recording minus one voice”. Remove the lead vocal and you get a karaoke, minus-one or playback track. In practice a minus is either an arrangement re-cut with session musicians (legally closer to a cover: a new phonogram plus a mechanical license on the composition) or an instrumental version obtained from the source recording by cutting the vocal - and that is already work on the master phonogram, with all of a remix's restrictions.
Technically, a vocal is removed from a finished record in two ways. The old method is suppressing the centre channel of the stereo panorama, where the voice usually sits; its weakness is that everything matching the voice in spectrum and position disappears along with it. The modern method is neural source separation: models trained on multitrack recordings recover the instrumental parts more accurately, but they still stumble on records with aggressive vocal processing and a dense 2-5 kHz range.
Who gets paid: the composer or the phonogram owner
The cleanest way to hold the four concepts apart is one comparison:
- Cover - the song is re-recorded. A new phonogram appears. The composer and publisher are paid through a mechanical license. In the US it is compulsory; the composer's consent is not required.
- Remix - someone else's phonogram is reassembled. There is no new recording, only a modified copy of the master. The phonogram owner's clearance is required; no compulsory license exists for the master.
- Tribute - a set of covers of one writer. The legal nature is the same as a cover; the difference is the compilation format.
- Minus - a phonogram without the vocal part. Re-cut with session musicians, it is closer to a cover; obtained by stripping the vocal from a master, it is closer to a remix as far as phonogram rights go.
The line, then, runs along the object of rights: the song (composition) against the phonogram (master). A cover and a tribute touch the composition and create a new phonogram; a remix and a “cut” minus touch someone else's phonogram and need its owner's consent. Where the line between a cover and an italo-disco reworking of Soviet songs falls is easiest to see on concrete tracks.
Where the line runs in practice
A clean case where all four concepts show up on one family of recordings is “Zelenoglazoe Taxi” (“Green-Eyed Taxi”). Composer Oleg Kvasha wrote it in 1987 (to lyrics by Valery Panfilov) and first performed it himself. In November 1987 Mikhail Boyarsky recorded it for a Melodiya long-play - that is a cover: a new phonogram, a mechanical royalty to Kvasha. In January 2007 the Austrian group Global Deejays put out a dance version that took Kvasha's vocal from his own 2000 album “Tantsevalny Proekt Kvasha” and sat a new beat under it - that is a remix, because an existing phonogram is being used. The English version by F. R. David in 2007 and the “metal” version by Alexander Pushny from 12 December 2007 are covers again: new phonograms, only carried into another language and another genre.
Return to “I Will Always Love You”. Houston's record is a cover: a new phonogram, a mechanical royalty to Parton, no re-record permission needed. Now imagine someone takes Houston's 1992 recording itself, lifts the vocal out of it, drops a new beat underneath and releases a dance version - that is a remix, and without the master owner's consent it cannot come out legally. But if the same crew of musicians re-plays the accompaniment and lays a new vocal on top, it is a cover again, with its own mechanical license.
Four words describe four different objects of rights and four different technical actions. “Reworking” blurs that difference in everyday speech; in contracts and in the studio it does not.