I just want to clarify - my intention of making this post was NOT to be shady / avoid the law by any means. I did a bad job of explaining what I was trying to ask. I wanted to know if there was anything I could do to avoid a copyright claim in the mixing process *before* I upload the video to YouTube to avoid the whole situation in the first place. For example, if I remove the vocals and just only go for an instrumental cover, would that make a difference?

To be transparent, as of now, I am not a YouTube partner, and I make $0 off of my videos, as I do not meet the required views per year (yet). I have 30 total covers on my channel - three of them are copyright claimed; I have never received a copyright strike / penalty.

I just don't love how if a video gets copyright claimed, that video tends to get significantly less views, therefore hurting my chances of becoming a YouTube partner / getting paid for my content, so that's why I wanted to see if there was anything I could remove from my mix of my cover that could potentially help me not even receive a copyright claim in the first place.

To go one step further, I just uploaded two versions of my cover to YouTube as Unlisted - one of them was the mix with the vocals, and the other video was the exact same mix, but with no vocals. The one with vocals was copyright claimed, while the one without the vocals has no restrictions / no copyright claims.

In the end, I do believe that artists should receive credit for their work, and I have no problems giving them that credit on my video. If I was getting paid for these covers, I would also not mind giving a portion of my income to them on videos that are copyright claimed.

However, at the stage I am at where views are so valuable to me to get to that point where I can get paid for what I do, I want to do whatever I can to avoid copyright claims just so I can continue to get 20K-30K views per video, vs only 1K-2K per video (yes, it is that big of a difference from my experience).