The Demise of the Cover

There's a reason a cover hasn't topped the Billboard Hot 100 since 2001.

Last week, I clarified what I meant when I described a sample as lazy. In addition to that discussion about sampling, we also talked about two other ways artists interact with older musical ideas: interpolations and covers. Since we know what each of those are now, I want to talk about how often they are used and…

Why Nobody Covers Songs Anymore

If we define a cover as a song that the artist did not write and was not the first to record, then the last cover to top the charts was a version of “Lady Marmalade” recorded by Christina Aguilera, Lil' Kim, Mýa, & Pink for Baz Lurhmann’s 2001 film Moulin Rouge!. The song was originally done by Labelle in 1975. In fact, it’s one of only nine songs to top the charts by two different artists.

Covers released by popular artists used to be very common. In fact, if you were an artist in the days of yore, it was expected that you were going to do covers. For example, 11 of the 12 songs on The Rolling Stones’ first album were covers. Similarly, 11 of 13 songs on Bob Dylan’s first album and 6 of 14 songs on The Beatles’ first album were respectively covers too.