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How to Use Cover Songs to Grow Your Fanbase

Cover songs offer one of the fastest paths to growth. Taking a song that's already proven to be likable and adding your own twist can build or expand a fanbase. The financial rewards won't match original songs, and covers don't carry the same artistic integrity, but countless artists across every era have used covers to gain traction. But there’s many hidden traps and tricks to get them to work as best for your growth.

Understanding the Core Principles

A great song is the greatest marketing tool in music. Covering a song you already find great seems like a solid start, but it's more complicated. The originator already found an emotionally powerful way to perform the song. You need to bring something new, because listeners won't choose a weaker version over the original.

A cover works when you accomplish one of three things.

1. First, find an emotion that's underplayed in the original. The most popular covers often identify an emotion present in the original but not dominant in the originator's version.

2. Second, put the song into a different context. A punk song about heartbreak turned into a slow acoustic ballad can be highly impactful. Sometimes a song was recorded in a genre that doesn't match what the lyrics express musically.

3. Third, take a song no one in your genre is familiar with and popularize it.

Taking a great bedroom pop song and doing another poorly recorded version with an inferior performance goes nowhere. Taking a number one hit everyone knows and making a less well-produced version without as powerful a performance is equally futile. The cover needs to offer something the original doesn't.

Covers function as a “funnel”. The concept catches a lot at the wide end, and when people come out the other side, they go into a container. A cover song funnels people into checking you out and seeing your other material. While it's valuable if the cover gets popular, the real goal is for people to know you for who you are and what you actually do.

Target the Right Platforms

Spotify doesn't let you pitch cover songs to playlists. They do add them to playlists—visible evidence exists everywhere. If the playlist curator recognizes the song or you indicate it's a cover in your pitch, it may get denied. If you're taking a song others don't know and putting a new spin on it, you could probably get away with it.

Covers don't usually excel for Spotify marketing in the first place. The TikTok algorithm offers the greatest marketing opportunity for musicians. In the earworm era of music marketing, posting a hook of your cover to TikTok can potentially blow up if people catch onto it.

Post to TikTok, Reels, and Shorts. Use hashtags and add tags to target the artist you're covering's audience or the micro-genre your cover falls into. If you took a Frank Sinatra song and made it hyperpop, use hashtags that reach a hyperpop audience, not a Frank Sinatra audience—they'll think you bastardized the song. Targeting both the originator and the new genre you bring creates valid funnels that get people to discover you and get to know you better.

Getting the cover to catch requires posting short-form content frequently. Posting once won't do it. Consistent posting gives the algorithm multiple chances to test and spread your content.

Enjoying this? Forward it to a music friend you’d like to be closer to and start a discussion!

Get the Artist to Notice

Some covers blow up when the artist shares them because they love them. Tagging the artist mostly links you in the algorithm, so it sees you as connected to them, surfacing your cover to their fans. Getting the artist to actually see it requires a different approach.

The best method: follow and tag in the comments the people who worked on the song who aren't in the spotlight and are inundated with a million tags daily. Tons of artists receive cool covers of songs from producers, mix engineers, or mastering engineers who get tagged. Session players, songwriters, and managers also share covers. Group threads form constantly, where someone involved in making the song sends it to everyone else involved.

If you’re going to do this method, you have the song up on more than social media, AKA YouTube or Spotify. Hit a service like Soundrop to secure a cover license. Without paying royalties on a cover, if the artist finds out and it's blowing up, significant money could be owed.

This technique works best when another account tags those people in the comments. It looks like a fan is alerting them, seeming more authentic. For a producer or session keyboardist, this gives a reason to text the artist and maintain that relationship if the cover's good. It starts a conversation that may get them in the conversation for the next song, potentially giving a career a shot at life in minutes.

Find the people who worked on a song: buy the CD or vinyl, check Spotify for credits. Sites like AllMusic or Discogs list credits extensively, though those sites deteriorate over time. Some artists post cool credit posts on social media like Instagram—check their Instagram if the song is from recent years.

Distribute Strategically Across Platforms

Full-length covers belong on YouTube. The way YouTube works: as it sees content being shared, it recommends it to more people it thinks may like it. It trains the algorithm to recognize you as associated with the group you covered and may serve your content to users who watch covers of that song or watch it frequently.

If a cover starts to blow up on YouTube or TikTok, adding it to other streaming services like Spotify becomes worth considering. When people hear songs on TikTok, Reels, or YouTube Shorts, they often go to Spotify to hear the rest. Building relationships with fans works perfectly this way.

Having the cover on Spotify offers advantages when people want to hear the full version, but it remains an artistic choice. Everyone has a different barometer.

Avoid the Cover Artist Trap

Doing covers regularly risks having your audience only like you for covers. Without regularly releasing originals or using similar hashtags or creating in the genre you're doing the cover in, you'll probably lose the people you funneled in. They won't convert to fans of your originals unless you feed the audience those originals regularly.

Many artists get stuck in this problem. Everyone knows them for covers because they did too many in a row and loved the growth they saw. The audience came for covers and stayed for covers because the artist didn't give them originals consistently enough to shift their perception.

Balance remains critical. Use covers as entry points, not the entire strategy. Feed fans originals with the same consistency you feed them covers, using the same hashtags and genre positioning to train the algorithm that both types of content belong to the same artist identity.

Understanding what to post and when separates artists who use covers as a growth tool from artists who become trapped by them. Strategic planning around content posting frequency, platform selection, and audience conversion determines whether covers build a sustainable fanbase or create a dead end where growth stops the moment you stop covering other people's songs.