On 26 Oct 2001, at 8:52, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: > And while I can vouch for the fact that Joni's been covered a lot, I thank my > lucky stars that I'm not commanding a Dylan covers project! While Joni's got one > "franchise" song (BSN) and maybe 2 others (Woodstock & BYT), Dylan's got about > 20 that fall in that BSN category! What I don't know, and what would be an > interesting thing to research, is what percentage of Joni's songs vs. Dylan's > songs have been covered. Obviously, The Beatles have been covered more as well, > but the reference was to a SINGLE songwriter. I would guess that Paul Simon has > probably been covered as much as Joni. Just a guess.
I have racked my brain trying to think of a single or even a collection of resources which would yield the answer to this question without a very time intensive effort. Most of the recording databases are categorized by artist, album and song with some metadata relative to the release but not songwriter. The performing rights databases are very weak in terms of the amount of information made available. And the publishers themselves are less concerned with the number of covers and more concerned with tracking the revenue generated by the most financially successful covers. I'm stumped. Brenda n.p.: Cowboy Junkies - "Sweet Jane"
