Dave000
If you put up a cover song and you get 500 plays you owe the artist x cents for each play...
But if you don't pay and sneak around with fake names of songs and/or you don't have permission you can get sued..
Unless the artist gives up his royalty right by posting someplace like sound cloud.. this is a separate issue that is an agreement between the artist and Sound Cloud or where ever posted... here as well...
Soundcloud claims not to take any ownership right in your posting, which is technically true. What you give to SoundCloud and users of the "platform" i. e anyone able to hear your music posted there, is a royalty-free license to your performance that they can sublicense to others who are accessing it in what they call "linked services." So your rights are intact, but you have licensed them for nothing.
If you are the original author of a work posted to SoundCloud by another person performing your song, you retain full rights to the musical composition, regardless of who has posted it there. If someone "covers" your composition without obtaining a license from you, then SoundCloud may not disseminate it...end of story. Not only is it a violation of the terms of service, for someone to post a pirated cover, it invalidates any license SoundCloud or its users can claim to have received on the composition, and their only defense is the safe harbor provision of the Digital Millennium copyright act, so you can require them to remove it.
If you post your performance of your own original composition, then you grant a license to SoundCloud to distribute your performance, and in addition you grant, "a limited, worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free, fully paid up, license to other users of the Platform, and to operators and users of any other websites, apps and/or platforms to which Your Content has been shared or embedded using the Services (“Linked Services”), to use, copy, listen to offline, repost, transmit or otherwise distribute, publicly display, publicly perform, adapt, prepare derivative works of, compile, make available and otherwise communicate to the public." Just to be clear, that means that while the license is intact, anyone can do a recording of your original composition, and to use samples of it in their own work (a derivative work) without paying you anything.
Although you can request that SoundCloud remove your work from public access at any time, under 17 U.S. Code § 203 (b) (1):
"A derivative work prepared under authority of the grant before its termination may continue to be utilized under the terms of the grant after its termination, but this privilege does not extend to the preparation after the termination of other derivative works based upon the copyrighted work covered by the terminated grant."
So if someone finds your song/composition posted by you on SoundCloud, and makes his own version of it without your knowledge or permission, he is licensed to sell as many copies as he wants forever without owing you anything in return, even if you later request SoundCloud to take it down. This is MUCH worse than just making your song available for compulsory licensing, in which case you would be owed a royalty. This may not be what SoundCloud intends, but the wording of their license is so overly broad, that you are potentially giving up your right to be paid for your composition. If that is not what you intend, then do not post to SoundCloud.