I have worked as a teaching assistant for University of Rochester professor John Covach, whose primary focus is pop music history.

The first thing we need to understand is that covers were not truly considered covers until the 1960s. Until then the "unit of trade" had been the song itself; the original artist had no rights over recordings by other musicians. Sheet music was very popular in the early 20th century further cementing the song, and not any recording, as the sought after item. Once records became popular it was still not established to credit the first recording of a song as the "true" recording. Record distribution at this time was very expensive, so instead of one version of a song being in every store across the country, different regions would have their own recording by their own artist. This artist would likely be paid a flat fee for the recording, making them tied to that recording alone and not the song itself.

As the distribution area widened the practice of covers continued. There are a few reasons why covers were still recorded so frequently. The first was due to black musicians becoming popular. At this time the music business was heavily influenced by the music charts (like Billboard) and were split into three categories: pop, country & western, and rhythm & blues (at this point "r&b" was just a way to say "music by black artists"). Teens and young adults began listening to r&b music, but their parents often did not approve of the artists due to their race and the often inappropriate lyrics. So in order to give the kids r&b music while making the parents happy record companies began covering r&b songs with white artists. A good example of this is "Shake, Rattle, and Roll", originally recorded by Big Joe Turner and later "cleaned up" by Bill Haley and the Comets.* This was very controversial as many black musicians felt ripped off; white musicians who were now getting record deals, but black artists were still being given the flat fee. At least one musician, Chuck Berry, circumvented this by making his own recordings sound "white" making any covers redundant.

Once we reach the early 60s covers become the standard for album fillers. Bands were expected to put out multiple albums within a year and songwriters (at this time most bands did not write their own songs) had a lot to write. Quickly written, low quality songs, along with covers, allowed bands to release several "complete" albums within a year. This practice continued and that is why you see some of the covers OP listed; why struggle to write a song that you're not satisfied with when you can record a solid cover of a tune you and the general population already love?

The Beatles took advantage of covers in a different way. When performing on the BBC they played as few original Beatles songs as possible and instead played covers, as the BBC had the right to sell any recording of their shows, and the Beatles did not want to harm their record sales.

That logic has now flipped as new laws and regulations ensure that the original artists/songwriters make money from covers. Modern record companies would rather have poorly-written original songs than lose any profit to the original artist for a cover version.

Works Cited

"What's That Sound? An Introduction to Rock and Its History" by John Covach

"The Beatles: the Biography" by Bob Spitz

*Mods, this is my first post here so I'm not sure if it's ok to include links to the songs I mentioned.

I can't give you a full answer, especial for the world of pop, but I get the sense from multiple sources that punk rock indirectly changed the "rock and roll" farm system, and with it, decreased the number of explicit cover bands, which may have indirectly decreased the number of covers on the radio as well.

Of course, punk wasn't the first musical movement like this, it didn't come out of nowhere. I get the impression that groups like the Beatles after Revolver and the Beach Boys circa Pet Sounds were very interesting in presenting rock and roll as art. This sort of art required "originality", which is possible to do with cover songs (cf. Johnny Cash's cover of Nine Inch Nail's "Hurt"), but is hard to do.

The originality of vision and of song writing became an important part of rock's "authenticity"--for example, it was one part of the reason the Monkees were scorned by critics as so inauthentic. They also obviously didn't play their own instruments, were created for a TV show, etc., but they tried to claim back some shred of authenticity later in their career by writing some of their own music and eventually playing their own instruments.

This change, going on from at least the mid-60's, was very different from earlier forms of popular music. Frank Sinatra's authenticity was in his voice, his delivery, it had nothing to do with who wrote his songs so much as how they were sung.

Folk music, too, had an appeal based in large part around authenticity. Early folk performers would perform a variety of covers and traditional songs--part of their authenticity was in that their tunes were traditional. They always had originals in the mix, but by the early 1970's "folk music" (and parts of "rock") had been more or less taken over by the "singer-songwriter"--the songwriting was now co-equal with the singing.

Punk, however, seems to have been a major change. I'll relate part of one of the best books about Punk and what came after ("new wave", "college rock", "alternative", "indie", take your pick) called Our Band Could Be Your Life by Michael Azerrad. The title of the book comes from a great song by the Minutemen ("History Lesson, Part II).

The members of the Minutemen grew up in San Pedro, a working class area of LA that is adjacent to and partially includes the Port of Los Angeles. All the following quotes are from Azerrad, pages 63-69.

Guns had not yet entered the picture, but it was still a rough neighborhood and [Minutemen singer, guitarist, and main song writer D.] Boon's mom didn't want the boys on the street after school; within weeks of [D. Moon and bassist Mike Watt's] meeting, she encouraged them to start a rock band. Watt wasn't sure he could play an instrument but was ready to give it a try for the sake of his friend.

They didn't know bass guitars were different from regular ones, so Watt just put four strings on a regular guitar; he didn't even know it was supposed to be tuned lower. In fact, they didn't even know about tuning at all. "We thought tightness of strings was a personal thing--like, 'I like my strings loose,'" Watt says. "We didn't know it had to do with pitch". As Watt puts it, "It must have made your asshole pucker from a mile away."

Eventually they got the hang of the finer points of musical technique and started a cover band of hard rock staples like Alice Cooper, Blue Oyster Cult, and Black Sabbath. [...]

In San Pedro, everyone played in cover bands, without any thought of writing their own songs or getting signed because, of course, those were things that other people did. The best [local] band was simply the one that could play [Led Zepplin's] "Black Dog" just like the original, and that was the peak of their ambition--when all you know is painting by numbers, you're not thinking about getting into the Museum of Modern Art. So Watt and Boon would apply play [the Guess Who's] "American Woman" over and over again, never thinking they could write their own songs or make their own records. "We didn't have the idea that you could go get signed; we didn't have the idea that you could write your own song," Watt says, shaking his head. "We didn't have that. Just did not have it."

Boon and Watt had the bad--or perhaps good--fortune to come of age during one of rock's most abject periods. "That Seventies stuff, the Journey, Boston, Foreigner stuff, it was lame," Watt says. "If it weren't for those type of bands we never would have had the nerve to be a band. But I guess you need bad things to make good things. It's like with farming--if you want to grow a good crop, you need a lot of manure."

If you've ever seen the show "Freaks and Geeks", there's a sub plot about one of the guys trying out for a local, semi-well known. They play both covers and originals, but that seems to be how many bands got noticed. These local bands would play at bars, and would vie for spots opening for big "arena rock" bands (a newly coined term at the time), but they wouldn't themselves usually tour until they got noticed and signed (usually on the strength of a demo tape with original songs, not covers, but they might have one or two covers on there as well).

But that's how the rock ecosystem worked at the time--there were local cover bands, who also sometimes played original music, at the bottom, and big arena rock bands at the top, but these local bands didn't do tour or record without being signed to a major label. As Azerrad recounts in multiple chapters, that's really one of the things that punk rock--and in particular, the band Black Flag--really changed in American popular music. Not only did SST record prove a successful model for later independent labels, but their signature band, Black Flag, quite literally created the map of venues and local promoters that let local bands tours without major backing. (Their had been earlier circuits, like Buddy Holly and the Crickets went to a lot of state fairs, etc. in the 1950's, but those seem to have broken down by the 1970's).

Now, of course, punk rock didn't kill covers. Several of my favorite early punk rock albums have cover songs on them (Minor Threat covered Wire's "12XU", the Minutemen covered Creedance Clearwater Revival), but they helped kill, or at least seriously diminish, the existence of local cover bands. This affected obviously not just punk rock, not just other genres like college rock that followed punk rock touring patterns (REM being perhaps the typical band) or genres like New Wave which took some other inspiration from punk, but a lot of the mainstream rock as well. Various kinds of metal, "hair metal"/"glam metal"/what have you perhaps most prototypically, were arguably the dominant form of popular rock and roll in the 1980's.

They seem to have had a very different eco-system from the Foreigner, Journey, Kansas, type arena rock bands--most of these made their big break in the LA club scene. Poison, for instance, was originally from Mechanicsburg, PA, but moved to LA in 1986. Guns N' Roses formed in LA, but lead singer Axl Rose moved to LA from Indiana specifically to join up with this scene. Motley Crue, Warrant, and several others all came up through that same LA scene. Of course, not everyone did--Bon Jovi, a new Jersey Band, made their name with a local hit on radio in New York. They helped their little brother band Skid Row to success later on.

But the idea of being in a "cover band" leading to being in a "touring band" seemed to have died around this era, with musicians across the wide spectrum of rock seemingly eschewing that as a stepping stone. I can't be sure what affect this had on covers on the charts, but it was a clear change in the rock and roll system.

Returning to the Minutemen:

Watt felt tainted by the experience of learning cover tunes and envied the younger punks for their purity. The Minutemen spent much artistic energy trying to unlearn the stifling archetypes that had been foisted on them during the Seventies; to their credit, they celebrated that process and the exciting discoveries they made along the way.

This, of course, isn't the only thing happening in pop music. One function covers had long played was allowing more "commercial" artists to record their own versions of great songs. In the 1950's, this was often white artists recording songs written by black artists. Pat Boone was the most famous artist doing this, but not the only one. Little Richard, sick of Boone recording his songs and charting higher than him, purposefully tried to write his next single at a tempo too fast for Boone to do (Boone did it anyway, though if I remember correctly, Little Richard's version charted higher).

So punk rock helping to kill the cover band both through creating new avenues for independent artists in terms of both independent tours and record sales and emphasizing as well the importance of "artistry", "authenticity", and "originality" of rock and roll musicians. I suspect pop musicians and A&R reps (remember A&R stands for "Arts and Repertoire"--a nod to the old days when label employs often chose artists performing and recording repertoires) began to emulate their rock colleagues. This change from punk rock alone, I'm sure, didn't kill recording new covers of recent hits, but I suspect it played a part in the process.

Edit: Again, this very consciously about only one small part of the change that I happen to know well. One of the things that I love about this format is it brings together people who know lots of different parts. Pay special attention to /u/hillsonghoods's answers (there are a lot of them scattered through the thread), but don't miss the answers by /u/thebitchboys and /u/north-bynortheast as well.

In the recording industry in the 1950s (or 1920s, for that matter), pretty much every popular musician covered every vaguely appropriate popular song. The Rodgers and Hart tune 'My Funny Valentine', for example, was covered separately by both Chet Baker and Frank Sinatra in 1954, and separately by both Ella Fitzgerald and Miles Davis in 1956 (and those artists are not out of the norm). And 'My Funny Valentine' is probably one amongst a dozen songs that each of these four artists each covered in this time period.

In fact, I have a book of Australian charts from the 1940s to the 2000s, and before the late 1950s, the charts in that book were focused on the song, rather than the performance - all of the different acts that were getting airplay/sales were listed after the name of the song, rather than each performance of the song being listed separately. And so one thing to remember is that the music industry existed before the recording industry; the primary way in which Tin Pan Alley songwriters made money is by selling sheet music, by getting people to play the songs in their own homes. In this time, there was a job called 'song plugger' which was basically the job of convinced live performers to introduce new songs into their repertoires so the song would become better known and thus sell more sheet music. So what changed between the old era of song pluggers and every artist covering every song and the current era of Katy Perry's singles all being new songs?

One obvious change is that, by the mid-sixties, the way that people thought about records had fundamentally altered. In 1956, the record was, literally, a record of a performance - Frank Sinatra's version of 'My Funny Valentine' was likely recorded in one take on a stereo microphone setup, with Sinatra, in order to be louder, simply standing closer to the microphones than the orchestra.

But by 1967, you have something like the Beatles album Sergeant Peppers Lonely Hearts Club Band, assembled by overdubbing new performances on top of old, full of electronic effects and manipulation of tape recordings; it's a record that could not have been performed live at that time. By Sgt Peppers, it was clear that the record was no longer a record but an object of art in of its self. And if the record itself, rather than the song, is the object of desire, then a cover of a familiar song is no longer quite as much of a crowd-puller as it had been.

Going along with this change is that the ethos of jazz and Popular Music (in capitals) was replaced in the 1960s with the ethos of rock music and pop. In jazz (and/or the adult pre-rock Popular Music epitomised by Sinatra), individuality was demonstrated not in the choice of song, per se, but how that song was used as a canvas for virtuoso self-expression - in how Miles Davis soloed over the chords of the song, or how Sinatra chose to phrase the melody. In contrast, in rock, individuality is most strongly demonstrated through having a new song and sound of your own, preferably that you wrote yourself.

So these days, when Ryan Adams covers an entire Taylor Swift album, he is specifically covering that album - he is recording the covers in the knowledge that his is a secondary work, that people will be comparing his work to a more definitive work. In contrast, all of those versions of 'My Funny Valentine' in the 1950s were attempts at reaching the unreachable Platonic form of 'My Funny Valentine' epitomised by the sheet music, with none of the performances truly being definitive. 'You Belong To Me' belongs to Taylor Swift in a way that 'My Funny Valentine' can never belong to Chet Baker.

And many of the artists you specifically mention from the late 1960s as doing covers make styles of music which were in some ways more influenced by the ethos of jazz than the ethos of rock. Herb Alpert and Dusty Springfield both come from a sort of easy-listening, light-entertainment background which had the values of Popular Music rather than pop, because their music was often aimed at older audiences who had grown up with the older values of Popular Music.

Similarly, there was a multitude of covers by soul artists in the 1960s - for example, Sam Cooke's 'A Change Is Gonna Come' was covered by Solomon Burke, Otis Redding and Aretha Franklin, amongst others. This comes from a style of music with big influences from jazz; most of the Funk Brothers who were the band on Motown records, for example, were jazz musicians 'slumming it'. It wasn't until the turn of the seventies that you get soul/funk records like Marvin Gaye's What's Going On or Curtis Mayfield's soundtrack to Superfly where the ethos of rock, with its focus on the sound of records and on the statements being made in the music, becomes a more dominant flavour of black American music. It's not coincidentally around this time that the great tradition of the soul cover of the recent song begins to dry up.

I do feel covers of recent songs aren't taboo these days - just look on YouTube and you'll see a million covers of any recent pop hit, which suggests that there's a market for them - but the cover definitely doesn't get a talented pop artist as far as it did in the 1950s, because of the change in ethos and the change in the way that we listen to recordings now.

The Beatles. Let's set the stage before the Beatles took it by storm. Before the Beatles, recording artists had little creative input into the music they sang. Typically a producer had the vision and creative control. A producer would select the music (written by another author/ Tin Pan Alley), determine the arrangement of music with an arranger, supervise and direct the backing band, and finally supervise and direct the performance of the singer. The producer was determined to make a good sounding record, but more determined to make a good selling record. Because of this it was often to costly to rely on material written by a recoding artist, although it was done from time to time. It was also often too costly to rely on that artist to play an instrument either; even if the artist was talented, the time constraints of recording demanded a seasoned session musician (see Funk Brothers, Wrecking crew).

The Beatles came along in 1963 and changed this. They weren't the first, but they were the most successful, which is why marketing eventually followed this model. "Please Please Me", the Beatles debut album, feature 8 songs written by Lennon/ McCartney, and this record performed brilliantly. It also featured the group on instruments, fresh from their club playing days. The success of the beatles opened the door for other acts to record their own material, and many followed in their footsteps. However, it wasn't until Sgt Peppers that they would once again shape the industry. Although the album release coincides with two radio singles (penny lane, strawberry fields), Sgt Peppers is the original concept album, more specifically the concept of creating an album of work rather than push radio singles. Up until that point, radio singles were the key to any artists success. Albums took the back seat as a collection of other songs by that artist besides the radio single. Since Pepper (some would argue pet sounds is the originator of this), the shift has been towards recording a strong cohesive body of music (an album), although in the 2000s one could make the argument that this shifted back to singles.

Now to bring this all home it has to do with the trend that the Beatles created marketing wise. Recording artists continued to record material pre written and cover songs, but the sales shift was onto artists that created their own material, listeners wanted the originality that rock and roll provided. The shift is so apparent that today, many singers insists that they are contractually credited with writing a song even if they haven't contributed to the lyrics or the contribution is minor. Its been described to me as "write a word, get a third".

It would appear that this practice disappeared, but it actually happens more than you think today. Currently the number 1 record in America is "Closer" By the Chainsmokers. There are 6 individuals listed as writers on that record, and it's electronic. I'm unsure of the roles of all 6 individuals, and I don't think it's "ghostwritten", but that seems like a lot of people to write a song.

In looking at the examples that you have pointed to here, I would also note that part of this trend was the desire of publishing companies/ producers/ record labels to capitalize on a song's popularity through marketing to different radio audiences, which were more segmented in the 1960s (especially compared to post-Telecommunications Act radio in contemporary America). Thus the idea was to have a song operating in different radio markets (and performed by artists considered more appropriate for those markets). The appearance of crossover artists (artists who could chart on different charts--pop, r'n'b, jazz, etc.) did a lot to change this practice, as a single recording could serve multiple audiences. Think about Creedence Clearwater Revival and Ike and Tina Turner, just as another example of the earlier practices and someone like Michael Jackson or Prince as a crossover artist who later emerged. A later example of the former would be the Aerosmith and Run DMC collaboration in the 1980s.

/u/yodatsracist also points to another important trend within American popular music, which is the emergence of the album as "art". The album also became a critical marker in terms of commerce in popular music and the practice of covers was based on the importance of the single (45) format. Covers by no means disappeared at all but we often buried within LPs rather than released as singles (think about how artists such as David Bowie, Bob Dylan, or the Rolling Stones all had covers on their albums mixed with original songs--in essence, the cover became an artistic statement rather than "cash grab"). With LPs success, the catalog album market grew (Billboard Magazine, which often framed American understanding of popular music, defines a catalog album as an album over 18 months old, a duration that would capture several of the examples mentioned here). The continued success of the catalog market (most famously Pink Floyd's Dark Side of the Moon's decade long commercial power) helped for the development of new radio formats in the United States (e.g. classic rock), which were often predicated on playing the "original versions" of songs (even if these songs were often covers themselves) rather than having newer or contemporary artists cover these songs.

One last thought about commerce and covers: the emergence of sampling has changed the concept of covering and the economics of song publishing (which was an early driving force of covers). It would be more speculative at this point to factor this phenomenon into this specific music trend but there is at least some correlation. As sample-based hip-hop music became a dominant form of pop music, a new economy based on sampling pumped money into older song catalogs through a new (and perhaps more efficient) manner.

Source: Play It Again: Cover Songs in Popular Music

I read a book by Rob Bowman called Soulsville USA: The Story of Stax Records. In the book, there is a section about the emergence of Isaac Hayes. Isaac Hayes became known as Chef from South Park, but in the 1970s, he was one of the biggest music stars after his success from the Shaft soundtrack. Isaac Hayes was a successful songwriter with Stax Records, but in the aftermath of the death of Stax'a biggest star Otis Redding, the label was in need of new material. So Hayes took advantage and produced an album called Hot Buttered Soul. According to Bowman, the album was innovative because previously, soul music was singles driven. Artist released albums, but the focus was selling singles. Hot Buttered Soul had long songs that were not radio or jukebox friendly. Usually, much of the music on the albums were filler. So instead of going through the process of writing new songs for the albums that would be buried on an album that wouldn't sell, artists would just cover current hits and classics for the albums.

Reading a Slate article about the absence of black artist credit in the genre of Rock & Roll made me look into the history of "I Heard It Through the Grapevine." Motown often had multiple artists from its roster sings songs written by its stable of songwriters to maximize in-house revenue. Grapevine was written by Motown writers and given to multiple artists. A single was released by Gladys Knight and the Pips and was a major hit. Marvin Gaye covered the song for an album and had a distinctly different version. Radio program directors put pressure on Motown to release it as a single. It became a single and was a bigger hit than the Gladys Knight version a year earlier.

I love cover versions of great songs!

There was a time, pre-mid-sixties and before, when singers were singers and songwriters were songwriters, and they seldom did both. Singers, or their management at the record company, were always on the lookout for good songs that fit the singer's voice and image, and had the possibility of getting on the charts and becoming a hit. The first to have a hit with a song usually became associated with strongly with it, but that didn't mean someone else couldn't sing that same song to fill out an album, or even to have a hit with it. Covers seldom did as well as the original, but they could still make money, and there is a whole strata of the music industry where business is build on emulating those at the top. It might not pay as good as first place, but it can still pay well.

Often, covers were done in different genres of music, with minor adjustments to make them more palatable to that genre's audience. For instance, when The Beatles really became known for their own songs after Revolver and Rubber Soul, jazz and Easy Listening Artists began to perform certain songs that could be transmuted. It was not unusual to be watching a variety show like the Ed Sullivan Show or the Carol Burnett Show or a talk show like Mike Douglas, Merv Griffin, or the Tonight Show, and see Steve Lawrence and Edie Gorme or Dean Martin come out and sing a Beatles tune. When Something came out, it was practically an easy listening tune in its original version. It instantly became popular on the cocktail lounge circuit. Yesterday is still credited as the most covered tune in history.

Jazz artists artists also found inspiration in Beatles tunes, and Count Basie released an album of Beatles covers as early as 1966. I am a collector of Beatles covers, and my favorite is probably Ella Fitzgerald's version of Hey Jude, which is laughably bad, cringeworthy throughout the entire song.

But the most interesting Beatles covers were those by other musical artists, sometimes even artists that were considered rivals of the Beatles, like the Beach Boys. Even singers who were well-known for their own songwriting skills, like John Denver or Neil Diamond (who started as simply a song writer and later began to sing his own songs) or even Bob Dylan (Bob Dylan!), recognized the greatness of many Beatles songs and recorded them.

As for being rare or taboo today, I don't think that's really true. Now that rock music is better than 60 years old, there are a lot of great classic tunes, and they often pop up on albums or in live performances.

The bottom line is that a great singer wants to sing great songs, and they don't really care where they came from.