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\n \u201c\u2018Fight Song\u2019 is literally about reclaiming your voice. Now it belongs to me again.\u201d
\n Photo: Nicholas Whitmill\n <\/p>\n
Rachel Platten couldn\u2019t figure out where all the money went. It was 2015, and the then-34-year-old singer was in the midst of a major-label breakout thanks to the success of \u201cFight Song,\u201d her single that charted in the top ten in nine countries. It was a long time coming for Platten, who had spent 15 years selling CDs out of suitcases and sleeping in vans between gigs. \u201cFight Song\u201d alone took two years to write. She\u2019d reworked its perseverance-themed lyrics endlessly and recorded nearly 20 versions on her own dime. Even then, it wasn\u2019t until the song achieved organic radio buzz that Columbia Records entered the picture and scooped up the rights. After all that, she found herself squinting at her royalty checks and wondering why they looked a little light. The deal she\u2019d signed with Columbia had left her with only 17 percent ownership of the song\u2019s master recording. Unbeknownst to her, the label was raking back recording and marketing expenses she\u2019d thought they would cover. \u201cI said yes to the $1,000-a-day studio. I said yes to the $5,000 dress,\u201d she says. \u201cI just want to hold that girl and be like, \u2018Girl, you don\u2019t need those shoes. You\u2019re paying for it.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n
That sort of lament is not uncommon among artists who get swept up in the major-label system: They\u2019re so eager to capitalize on their moment when offers start arriving that they don\u2019t take time to haggle over, or sometimes even understand, the finer points of their contracts. \u201cI certainly could have structured a better deal if I had believed in myself just a little bit more,\u201d Platten says, \u201cand been a little bit less scared to lose what I had worked for 15 years to get a chance to do.\u201d Even so, \u201cFight Song\u201d was a big-enough hit that the deal was a win-win: Columbia recouped its investment \u201cmany times over,\u201d while Platten says she made enough money from her stake (not to mention her 65 percent ownership of the song\u2019s publishing rights) to transform her life. But the song was also intensely personal, and she occasionally wonders what might\u2019ve happened if she\u2019d never signed a deal.<\/p>\n
There are no do-overs in the music industry, but ten years later, Platten is undertaking the next best thing. On September 26, she released Fight Song (Rachel\u2019s Version)<\/a>, an album comprising largely rerecordings of songs from her 2016 album, Wildfire, released while she was under contract at Columbia. The title is a direct nod to Taylor Swift, who famously began releasing rerecorded \u201cTaylor\u2019s Versions\u201d of her albums to regain control of her catalogue after her former label, Big Machine Records, was purchased by music mogul Scooter Braun in 2019. Platten performed alongside Swift during the Philadelphia leg of her 1989 World Tour in 2015, when \u201cFight Song\u201d was at its peak; both then<\/a> and now, Platten has credited Swift for opening the door for her. \u201cI\u2019m grateful to @TaylorSwift for bringing this conversation to light and empowering artists to take back control over their work, their stories, and their futures,\u201d she wrote on Instagram<\/a> in May in her album announcement. But with the exception of a select few acts such as Platten and the early-aughts rock outfit Switchfoot, there hasn\u2019t been a surge of musicians who have rushed to rerecord their music in the wake of Swift\u2019s project. Considering the various calculations involved, it seems unlikely that we\u2019ll see one.<\/p>\n Swift wasn\u2019t the first artist to rerecord her music in the name of empowerment, but the scale on which she did so drew renewed attention to a tactic that is otherwise relatively rare. In recent decades, artists such as Prince, Def Leppard<\/a>, Blondie<\/a>, and JoJo<\/a> all released new versions of music previously recorded for a label to wrest back ownership. In a 1999 interview with Paper<\/a>, Prince explained his rationale for rereleasing his iconic hit \u201c1999\u201d from his EP 1999 the New Masters under his own label, New Power Generation. \u201cI wanted to buy my masters back from Warner Bros. They said no way. So I\u2019m going to rerecord them. All of them,\u201d he said. \u201cNow you will have two catalogs with pretty much exactly the same music \u2014 except mine will be better \u2014 and you can either give your money to WB, the big company, or to NPG.\u201d (The New Masters EP peaked at 150 on the U.S. Billboard 200<\/a>, and fans were divided on the artistic merits of the new mix, so Prince may have overestimated the appetite for helping him stick it to Warner Bros.)<\/p>\n In 2023, Switchfoot released The Beautiful Letdown (Our Version) to mark the 20th anniversary of their most popular album. They took a painstaking approach to faithfully re-creating their old songs, including having a friend rerecord an old answering-machine message they\u2019d included on the intro to their song \u201cGone\u201d and tracking down producer Matt Beckley to ask him to re-create a laugh he let out when they were recording \u201cAmmunition.\u201d For them, it was less about the direct-revenue opportunity \u2014 \u201cYou\u2019re talking about a very small percent of an artist\u2019s income,\u201d drummer Chad Butler says of the songs\u2019 royalties, even with the band\u2019s increased share \u2014 and more about marketing. Any profits they made, they say, came from the tour they organized to celebrate the anniversary, for which the new album served as a de facto \u201cposter on Spotify.\u201d (The band briefly discussed rerecording their second-most popular album, Nothing Is Sound, but \u201cI don\u2019t know that we\u2019ll ever do that again,\u201d says vocalist Jon Foreman.)<\/p>\n Platten\u2019s fan base isn\u2019t as rabid as Swift\u2019s<\/a> (whose is?), but if she can make converts of enough of her 3.6 million current monthly Spotify listeners, a much smaller number than her total monthly streams, the margins \u2014 especially with the royalty share she\u2019s entitled to as the songs\u2019 sole rightsholder \u2014 could add up. In 2025, estimates<\/a> say that 1 million streams on Spotify generate $4,370 in royalties. That\u2019s split between rightsholders (56 percent), the streaming service (30 percent), and publishers\/songwriters (14 percent), per a 2024 report<\/a> conducted by consulting firm MIDIA Research. As a 17 percent rightsholder of the original version song of \u201cFight Song,\u201d Platten receives only this sliver of the 56 percent on offer ($416.02 per one million streams), but one million streams of the new version nets her the full 56% ($2,447.20).<\/p>\n Outside of streaming royalties, Platten hopes to offset some of her investment (she wouldn\u2019t share how much she spent recording and marketing the new album) through the control she now has over how the song is licensed. Fees for media placements vary depending on how high-profile the licensee is and how prominently they feature the song, but given how often \u201cFight Song\u201d has been used by gigantic brands such as WWE, Ford, and the NFL, it could amount to a meaningful source of revenue over time. (\u201cYour lips to God\u2019s ears,\u201d she jokes when asked about brands and music supervisors approaching her directly.) Even if these opportunities don\u2019t come knocking, Platten reserves the right, as one of the song\u2019s credited writers, to reject licensing requests for the original \u2014 and can then redirect people to her nearly identical version. Plus she can seek out and entertain smaller licensing opportunities that might slip through the cracks at a big company like Columbia.<\/p>\n Being cut out of these deals is hardly ideal for record companies. While labels recoup much of their investment through royalty shares, they dedicate significant time and labor to newly signed artists with the hope that the gamble will continue generating profits for years to come. That\u2019s why labels have included time-bound \u201crerecording restrictions\u201d in artists\u2019 contracts since the early 1960s that impede artists from releasing competing song versions that undercut their returns. According to Mark Tavern, who teaches courses about the music industry at the University of New Haven, the practice dates back to country-rock pioneers the Everly Brothers. After releasing a slate of hit songs under the now-defunct Cadence Records from 1957 to 1959, the duo were lured away from their contract with a big offer from Warner Bros in 1960. \u201cThey immediately rerecorded their hits for the new label,\u201d Tavern says, \u201cand that\u2019s when record companies were like, \u2018Wait, we have to stop this.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n Following the Everly Brothers, recording restrictions became a \u201cboilerplate\u201d aspect of contract negotiations. But in a post \u201cTaylor\u2019s Version\u201d world, record companies have begun trying to shore up their protections. \u201cTo avoid a situation where their copyrights are being devalued in the marketplace,\u201d says Cody Brown, a partner at the entertainment-law firm Ritzhold Levy Fields LLP, some record labels have begun pushing for rerecording restrictions as lengthy as seven to ten years after initial commercial release, a significant increase on the previous standard of \u201cthe later of five years after initial commercial release or two years after contract expiration or termination.\u201d There have even been cases where Brown has witnessed labels try to stipulate \u201cperpetual rerecording restrictions.\u201d Such clauses are a standard part of the catalogue-acquisition deals<\/a> that have been heavily publicized in recent years thanks to the big-name artists (Bruce Springsteen<\/a>, Red Hot Chili Peppers<\/a>, Stevie Nicks<\/a>, et al.) and eye-popping dollar figures ($500 million, $140 million, $100 million, respectively) attached. \u201cI don\u2019t believe a buyer would feel comfortable entering into a deal with an artist for the sale of their music assets without a rerecord restriction,\u201d Brown says. \u201cIf you\u2019re paying 15x on a deal, and the artist, the next day, cuts his own records and then does a decent job marketing and promoting them, it will have a significant impact on the return for the buyer.\u201d<\/p>\n How amenable artists are to record companies lengthening rerecording restrictions depends largely on how much leverage they have to push back, which makes it more of a concern for emerging acts than veteran artists. Newer artists who sign to labels after amassing their own buzz like Ice Spice, Olivia Rodrigo, and BLACKPINK\u2019s Lisa are increasingly opting to negotiate time-bound licensing deals<\/a>, rather than standard recording contracts, in which 100 percent of their rights revert back to them at the end of this period. According to Brown, rerecording restrictions in these instances typically match up with the term of the license. But labels have also started signing newer artists with viral hits, such as lo-fi act coldbrew<\/a>, to deals on a song-by-song basis, and in these negotiations, artists tend to cede longer rerecording restrictions in favor of short-term advances. Labels are \u201ckind of falling over themselves to get an artist under contract so that they can make income from them before their song stops going viral,\u201d says Tavern, but they have to protect themselves from these artists\u2019 rerecording their songs because of how easy it is for a new version to be uploaded as a \u201csound\u201d on TikTok and go viral all over again.<\/p>\n Platten\u2019s rerecording restriction for Wildfire didn\u2019t exceed eight years, so nothing prevented her from releasing Fight Song (Rachel\u2019s Version). She posits that there might be a few disgruntled folks in \u201cthe legal department or finance department\u201d at Columbia but says she\u2019s otherwise received nothing but encouragement from her former colleagues. It\u2019s not hard for the label to maintain its artist-friendly face in this instance. As of writing, the rerecorded tracks on Fight Song (Rachel\u2019s Version) have just over 800,000 streams on Spotify, and the album didn\u2019t crack the Billboard Hot 200. Barring an unexpected TikTok resurgence \u2014 a phenomenon that famously made Kate Bush $2.3 million dollars<\/a> after Stranger Things repopularized \u201cRunning Up the Hill\u201d in 2022 \u2014 the revenue generated by the rerecordings is unlikely to be a balance-sheet game-changer for a company Columbia\u2019s size. Fight Song (Rachel\u2019s Version) was an uncertain bet by Platten, one that she has the luxury of placing thanks to the financial freedom the original recording affords her. For most artists, it wouldn\u2019t make practical sense to spend time rerecording music \u2014\u00a0not in an era when labels are extending contractual moratoriums and nearly 50 percent of all streams go to songs recorded in the past five years<\/a>.<\/p>\n But who says it has to be good business? One point Brown raises is that some artists who rerecord their music cite motivations that are more sentimental than financial. \u201cThese copyrights are deeply personal to the artists who have put all of their creative energy into them,\u201d he says. \u201cIt\u2019s a sense of recapturing what was once theirs.\u201d Swift didn\u2019t need the income generated by her rerecordings to be wealthy. The same goes for Platten. Her time in the major-label system was an exercise in ceding control. One second, she was an artist with a smash hit being shepherded around the world. The next, she was pressured to put out a second album before she was ready. When that album, 2017\u2019s Waves, flopped, and she was deprioritized. Eight years later, she\u2019s looking to regain some control to set an example for her young daughters.<\/p>\n \u201c\u2018Fight Song\u2019 is literally about reclaiming your voice,\u201d she says. \u201cNow it belongs to me again. How much more can I live that message?\u201d<\/p>\n