PUBLIC MARKS with tags covers & reprises

What is a cover song? A cover song is a song recorded by someone other than the original artist. Wikipedia has an excellent article that goes into great depth, discussing various aspects of the covered versions of songs. How do you define the "Original" artist? For the purposes of the project, we define the "original" as the first person who released a recorded version of the song. Case in point: apparently Danzig wrote a song ("Thirteen") which Johnny Cash released in 1994. In 1999, Danzig also recorded the song, so technically (for the purpose of The Covers Project) they covered a Johnny Cash song that happened to have been written by themselves. What about remixes? Remixes are generally not eligible for inclusion in the database. Where does the term "Cover" come from? An interesting note about the origins of the phrase "Cover Song" from Mark Edwards at WICC Radio: An example of a COVER record would be the release of "Sh-Boom" by the Crew Cuts in 1955 at almost the same time as the original by The Chords. The term COVER record is taken from the fact that the Crew-Cuts version, being performed by a white group and distributed by a major record label, and thus finding considerable additional radio airplay, would COVER any chance of success that the original release may have had. What is this MusicBrainz stuff? MusicBrainz is an amazing community music metadatabase that contains a comprehensive list of artists and songs. We use their data to validate all additions to the site. Not only do they have a wide variety of music information available, they also provide the ability to automatically identify and lable songs on your computer. Please consider donating to the MusicBrainz site at http://musicbrainz.org/contribute.html