The difference between a cover and a remix?

[MitchT]

Can anyone clarify exactly where a cover ends and a remix begins? If a bunch of guys with guitars get together and cover Sex Pistols songs at the local working men's club they're accepted as covers, but if someone gets a bunch of synthesizers and a drum machine and produces their own versions of famous dance tracks they tend to be thought of a remixes. If the license held by a venue permits a covers band to earn money performing other people's songs, is there anything to stop an electronic music producer creating their own interpretations of huge dance hits and playing a set consisting of said tracks, rather than just rocking up with decks and playing a DJ set of the original tracks?

[schmunk]

A remix is a reworking of the original song, i.e. it will contain samples of some or all of the published track. I think you'd be stretching the definition of "covers" to include this.

If you do as suggested, and play your unique interpretations of well-known dance songs, I suspect you'll deeply annoy a significant portion of your audience - I know it would irritate me...

[Some Gump]

Mitch, you'd presumably need to lisence the rights to the original samples / arrangement, otherwise you'd be in the same boat as blurred lines...

[MitchT]

There'd be no original samples - they'd all be completely new interpretations.

To expand on schmunk's point - I agree, it would be enjoying if some narcissist turned up and played their own versions of famous producer's hits. I suspect only someone who was very famous themself could really get away with this, but that's not what I'm interested in doing ...

What I'm interested in doing is picking some of my favourite trance trance - really melodic, 'picturesque' ones and using some of the hooks (re-played - not sampled) to create an ambient soundtrack-like experience which would be performed live on synths as a chill-out set. All I'm wondering is if this would be as 'legal' as a band performing covers?

[Tom_C76]

How would it be any different playing the hooks live to playing a DJ set from vinyl/CD/mp3? Issues only really start to arise if you record your performances and try to make money out of them.

For comparison, my band plays rock covers. Old stuff, bands like the Who, Skynyrd, Stones etc. Playing it live is fine, we're paid for our performances. The venue cover the publishing rights as part of their PRL license.

But when we post vids to YouTube some of them are being flagged up as potentially containing copyright material, with the names of the publishing rights holders. If we want to "monetise" (terrible Americanism) our YouTube channel by showing ads on it we have to acknowledge the copyright and share the proceeds with the rights holder.

[entropy]

MitchT said:

There'd be no original samples - they'd all be completely new interpretations.

To expand on schmunk's point - I agree, it would be enjoying if some narcissist turned up and played their own versions of famous producer's hits. I suspect only someone who was very famous themself could really get away with this, but that's not what I'm interested in doing ...

What I'm interested in doing is picking some of my favourite trance trance - really melodic, 'picturesque' ones and using some of the hooks (re-played - not sampled) to create an ambient soundtrack-like experience which would be performed live on synths as a chill-out set. All I'm wondering is if this would be as 'legal' as a band performing covers?

Sounds more like a cover but then are you using the same hardware/emulators for your hooks?

[MitchT]

Tom_C76 said:

How would it be any different playing the hooks live to playing a DJ set from vinyl/CD/mp3?

Really just to have a more organic and live feel to the performance. Rig-up some synths and do it more like a gig than a set.

entropy said:

Sounds more like a cover but then are you using the same hardware/emulators for your hooks?

Unlikely, but I don't think using the same hardware would matter - if the original composer has used presents then there's nothing to stop me using the same presets, but actually I'd much rather r create my own sounds.

The more I think about this the more I may just do the whole thing with my own compositions - the idea is just do do gigs of chilled out electronic music and I thought it might be cool to use some recognisable hooks in among to give the performances some context.

[Tom_C76]

MitchT said:

Tom_C76 said:

How would it be any different playing the hooks live to playing a DJ set from vinyl/CD/mp3?

Really just to have a more organic and live feel to the performance. Rig-up some synths and do it more like a gig than a set.

Sorry, I meant from a copyright point of view. If you DJ you're playing the entirety of someone else's work and getting paid for it. And often their work is a collection of samples of work by others too. What you're proposing to do, as long as you didn't claim to be creating all of the work from scratch such as to be entitled to publishing credits, would be more your own creation than any DJ set.