steps to legally selling personal rearrangements/covers of VGM sources

[The Biznut]

If things go very well, I'll have an albums worth of metalish songs completed by the summers end. If that happens, I'd like to put an album together and possibly sell it. Some of the tracks are originals and some are covers of VG themes, and thats where my question comes in.

first off, what is my due dilligence if I release this album publicly? How does it change if I want to sell the album? I'd be very lucky if more than 200 people bought it, I don't know if that affects anything.

I really don't know where to start and how far I need to go with this.

Thanks for your help!

[zircon]

In the U.S., there is a simple procedure of visiting a website (Harry Fox Agency), picking the songs you want to cover, and paying a fee for X licenses. The rate is 9.1 cents per song per download or album sale. You do have to prepay for digital sales. Not a bad deal overall. However, I have no idea what the Canadian laws are - the process I described above, which essentially is called 'compulsory mechanical licensing', is a U.S. law and not international.

[Kidd Cabbage]

Keep in mind that Harry Fox doesn't have every song registered, and that technically, most of the time we remix, we're violating copyright (copyright holder has the exclusive right to derivative works); just that most of the time, videogame covers and remixes are too small and insignificant for the copyright owners to really care.