The Eternal Conflict

You don't have to spend more than a couple minutes on any band-related web forum to notice the (more or less) yin/yang dividing line that seems to run down the middle of the music community, and any band will have to decide which side of that line it will fall on, or whether it wants to try to straddle the line. But the dichotomy cannot be ignored. I'm talking, of course, about the eternal debate: COVERS vs. ORIGINALS.

A cover band is a band that plays songs by other people. An originals band plays songs written by the band members, or one or some subset of them. Yes, I know there are some bands that mix it up (remember the No Consistency Rule) but in general, for the most part, bands are either cover bands or originals bands. A big reason for the dichotomy is that they operate in two entirely different markets. Some audiences want covers, and have little patience for originals, and other audiences want originals, and have little patience for covers. (There is a hybrid that can sort of cheat the categories, which I'll discuss below.)

What sort of band any given group of people form will depend, as discussed in my earlier post, on motivations. The two feed different needs. Let's think about how the various motivations discussed in that post come into play regarding the covers/originals question:

Creative Art: a musician motivated by a desire to create art and share art with the world, to get his/her message across through his/her art, will do that through original music.

Interpretive Art: Interpretive art has a role in both kinds of bands. Interpretive art encompasses multiple sub-categories, which may or may not come into play in different kinds of bands. It is sometimes said that everybody except the songwriter in an original band is really playing in a cover band, because they are playing somebody else's songs. But in many original bands, the other players contribute to arrangements (usually, by coming up with their own parts within the context of the song). Arrangement is an interpretive art and is not, technically, songwriting, but many people get satisfaction from contributing to the creation of new original music even if they don't write the songs themselves. So an original band can provide what motivates them. Another form of interpretive art, however, is performance. Of course performance should play a part in any original band, but performance is the artistic raison d'etre of a cover band. For people who are primarily interested in performance for their artistic outlet, cover bands provide a number of advantages, such as not needing to find a creative artist to work with, being able to draw from the works of the greatest songwriters of all time, ease in finding a receptive audience, and...

Money: Cover bands win this one, hands down. Unless and until you reach the high levels of the industry, cover bands have a much much easier time finding paying gigs and those gigs also tend to pay relatively more. At the highest levels, original artists make more money. But getting to that point is like winning the lottery---you can't plan on it (although, you should prepare for it if that's a direction you want to go, just in case). Suffice to say, nobody in their right mind forms an originals band and plans to make good money at it.

Ego and Libido: Cover bands have an easier time finding a larger audience than originals bands, so (again, unless and until you reach a high level in the industry) you will have more people clapping and cheering for you (and, potentially, lusting after you) playing in a cover band. However, if what you want is to be appreciated for your artistic genius, that will come from being in an originals band. And, playing in an originals band can still provide adulation and help you out with whoever you're trying to attract; it's just that audiences and the pool of candidates will be smaller. It's not an either/or; it's a matter of degree.

Cover bands tend to do better at low- to mid-levels. It is much easier to get paying gigs and find audiences as a cover band, and a good cover band can become a regional phenomenon and make a pretty good income, but there is a limit to how far that can go. The most successful cover bands tend to hit a plateau at regional success, and there's only so much they can charge.

Note that it was not always like that: in the early days of rock, people who were essentially cover artists became big stars, including most prominently the King of Rock 'n' Roll, Elvis Presley. Early on, the charts were full of artists who were mainly performers, who sang other people's songs---often, when one person would have a hit, within a year or two a bunch of other people would put out the same song as a single, and sometimes do better than the original artist. But all that changed in the 60s, as the Beatles set a new pattern, and from then on for many years artists (at least, rock bands) were expected to write their own music. There's no law of the universe that says that a great songwriter will also be a great arranger will also be a great performer, but fans wanted artists who did their own material, so that's what they got, and to a big extent still get.

Of course, singers who did songs by professional songwriters never went away, and in recent years that model seems to be making a bit of a comeback---it's fashionable to deride pretty-boy or -girl singing groups that are created by management companies to sing pop songs, but they are part of a long and well-established tradition that predated rock and will probably still be around when it's gone. But the bands that are formed to support those kinds of singers are a whole different paradigm compared to bands formed cooperatively by groups of like-minded musicians. And they are mainly formed of proven pros---if you're in the running to get those kinds of gigs, you're probably not reading this.

An originals band is usually a gamble. At the lower levels, playing originals is a pretty much thankless endeavor, requiring lots of work for little or no money. There always exists the possibility, however, albeit very remote, that one's original music will catch on: that the industry will get behind it and turn on the star-making machinery; that the public will hear and love it; and that the artist will ultimately be rewarded with, as Queen says, "fame and fortune and everything that goes with it". But it is, indeed, "no bed of roses, no pleasure cruise." What an originals band does offer at levels below stardom is an artistic outlet---the chance to reach people with one's art. It is just important to realize that that may be the ONLY benefit one gets from an originals band, for a long time if not ever. There are plenty of originals bands enjoying only small scale success but as long as expectations are realistic and the members artistic motivations are being allowed sufficient scope, it is entirely possible for such a band to be stable and happy indefinitely.

And it is of course possible for a cover band to NOT partake of the advantages available to cover bands: it is entirely possible to play covers that nobody wants to hear. But assuming a reasonable business plan and marketing effort, a cover band has a potential to get money-making gigs for bigger audiences than an originals band, all other things being equal.

So, there you have some of the main factors differentiating cover bands and originals bands. I mentioned earlier a hybrid that straddles the line, and that is the cover band that does its own different arrangements of songs, sometimes referred to as "doing it our own way" or "making the song our own". There's a continuum of artistic expression that goes something like this: performance = cover band; performance + arrangement = hybrid cover band; performance + arrangement + songwriting = originals band. (You could take this to amusing but ridiculous extremes: performance + songwriting = singer/songwriter; arrangement + songwriting (without performance) = nihilist shoegazer band (just kidding, nihilist shoegazer bands!).) A hybrid cover band uses familiar songs to tap into the cover band market but is really selling a performance more than the traditional cover band experience. They also face the same ultimate limitations as cover bands.

There are also of course bands that start out playing covers or play mainly covers but also throw in the occasional original. Unless and until originals constitute a substantial portion of the show, such bands are still cover bands, since that's how they're marketing themselves, and to have that luxury the bands have to establish themselves as cover bands first. Like hybrid bands, they may be able to transition into predominantly selling their performance rather than the specific songs they play, and ultimately they may be able to morph into originals bands. That's an interesting phenomenon, but probably for a different post.

So, that's all well and good. Unfortunately, out there in the cruel world of the interwebs, there is a lot of sniping back and forth between originals band people and cover band people. I think it is mainly due to neither group understanding, or at least not appreciating, the different motivations of the other group. Original players seem to take great pride in not compromising their artistic integrity for filthy lucre, and cover band players smirk all the way to the bank. Similarly, original players seem to often resent the ease with which cover bands (coincidentally, cover bands playing music they don't like) are able to get gigs, especially paying gigs, when the universe fails to recognize their own genius. But it's vital to recognize that for the most part, the markets for cover band music and original band music are completely separate. A gig that a cover band gets is almost certainly not a gig that an original band lost. Neither is in the running for the other's gigs. It's like a truck manufacturer resenting sales of sports cars.

Something else that goes on, and this is absolutely not everybody or even most people, but it does go on: "Art" is used as an excuse for a lack of mastery of craft. There are bands out there that play really bad versions of songs and justify it with "We do our own version." Sometimes, that just means that the band doesn't have the skill or talent to play the original arrangement. For your own sake and the happiness of everyone around you, don't kid yourself on this. Coming up with a good arrangement for a song takes skill and it takes a LOT of skill to come up with an all-new arrangement of a song that's already popular, and have it be good enough that people want to hear it instead of the arrangement they know. If you can do it, great, but I see lots of people on music forums give as general advice, "Do your own version!" and I think that a lot of bands are not really qualified to do that. That is not good advice for everybody. Working with limits in instrumentation is one thing---if a song has a prominent keyboard part and your band doesn't have a keyboard player, well, that's something you need to deal with. But I think that changing arrangements is often an attempt at short-cutting, and as such it rarely works. If you can't play a proven popular arrangement of a song, unless you know with a high degree of confidence that you can put together an alternate arrangement that is going to have wide appeal, the answer is not, I think, to plow ahead with your own inferior arrangement; the answer is to work harder on your playing, and in the mean time pick songs you can play. Which is not to say not to work on arrangements, but never let arrangements be a crutch to support a lack of technical ability.

Often the people giving the "Do your own version!" advice are original band musicians who are not even really among the target market for cover bands---they place a high value on artistic content and want to see other people put more of it into their shows, but they are not likely to buy tickets or pay cover to come see those shows. It's only natural that musicians interact a lot with other musicians, but that can give you a very skewed view of the world, since nobody can succeed playing only for other musicians, and the "civilian" audience has very different ideas about what it likes. So take advice from other musicians (besides me :-P) with a grain or two of salt, and make sure the person giving the advice is approaching the issue from a perspective that is helpful for your own situation.