[withinboredom]

There's several sides of music copyright:

1. The lyrics

2. The composition

3. The recording

These can all be owned by different people or the same person. The "royalty free covers" you mention are people abusing the rights of one of those. They're not avoiding royalties, they just havn't been caught yet.

[strogonoff]

I believe performance of a cover still results in relevant royalties paid to the original songwriter, just sans the performance fee, which does not strike me as a terrible ripoff (after all, a cover did take effort to arrange and perform).

[withinboredom]

What this person is talking about is they write “tvinkle tvinkle ittle stawr” instead of the real lyrics (basically just writing the words phonetically and/or misspelled) to try and bypass the law through “technicalities” that wouldn’t stand up in court.

[strogonoff]

I doubt so for a few reasons based on how they described this alleged parasitic activity, but mainly because the commenter alluded to Spotify doing this. Would be very surprising if they decided to do something so blatantly illegal, when they could keep extracting money by the truckload with their regular shady shenanigans that do not cross that legality line so obviously.

Regarding what you described, I don’t think I encountered this in the wild enough to remember. IANAL but if not cleared/registered properly as a cover it doesn’t seem to be a workaround or abuse, but would probably be found straight up illegal if the rights holder or relevant rights organization cares to sue. In this case, all I can say is “yes, some people do illegal stuff”. The system largely works.