that's what I thought but then my friend was wondering why YouTube's help article says no revenue sharing on live performances.
Don't worry, this is for live performances of the original song, not a cover. A cover is a cover is a cover. So you will get revenue share for this cover. I used to have a music oriented channel with many covers, but I deleted all the cover songs for several reasons:
1. The revenue share is crap! It's like 90% for the claimant (rights holder) and 10% for you. It's simply not worth it.
2. The claimant has control over your video. They can block it in certain countries (where they don't have license), can mute it, add links or cards in it or even take it down.
3. Some of the covers where not matched by the ContentID. While this sounds nice, its asking for trouble. If your video gets popular it will eventually get claimed and all your revenue will be taken by the claimant. If they are nice they will give you 10% as for cover, but they may not be. I've asked some popular claimants (such as the Orchardians that I have disgust for) to claim such unmatched videos, and they didn't respond at all. Getting in touch with right holders to give them 90% of revenue and they don't answer!
4. For each cover you have to search YouTube's library if it is eligible for revenue share, but some songs are not listed. You can find out only after you record the song and upload it. If it turns it's not eligible , you just spent some hours for the 100% revenue to the claimant and 0% for you.
So I gave my Korg PA 50 synth a rest. Later I installed a Gotek floppy emulator on my Korg and the videos that I made about it, got many more views that the covers and I got 100% of the revenue for much less work. So the covers experiment that I made turned out to be a totally unreasonable. Of course it may work for other people as there are many cover/lipsync channels on YouTube that are successful.
