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One of the MIREX competitions tasks this year was Cover Song Identification.  The goal was to find covers of a seed song within a much larger music collection.  The task was folded into the audio music similarity task, so groups that submitted similarity systems also participated in the cover song collection.  Interestingly, but perhaps unsurprisingly, systems that were developed specifically for cover song detection performed much better than general audio similarity systems. Dan Ellis's submission performed quite well.

Of course, finding a cover song is not the same as finding a good cover song.  A while back the Telegraph compiled a list of the top 50 covers ever.   Their pick for number 1 cover is no surprise.