“‘Fight Song’ is literally about reclaiming your voice. Now it belongs to me again.”
Photo: Nicholas Whitmill

Rachel Platten couldn’t 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 “Fight Song,” 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. “Fight Song” alone took two years to write. She’d reworked its perseverance-themed lyrics endlessly and recorded nearly 20 versions on her own dime. Even then, it wasn’t 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’d signed with Columbia had left her with only 17 percent ownership of the song’s master recording. Unbeknownst to her, the label was raking back recording and marketing expenses she’d thought they would cover. “I said yes to the $1,000-a-day studio. I said yes to the $5,000 dress,” she says. “I just want to hold that girl and be like, ‘Girl, you don’t need those shoes. You’re paying for it.’”

That sort of lament is not uncommon among artists who get swept up in the major-label system: They’re so eager to capitalize on their moment when offers start arriving that they don’t take time to haggle over, or sometimes even understand, the finer points of their contracts. “I certainly could have structured a better deal if I had believed in myself just a little bit more,” Platten says, “and been a little bit less scared to lose what I had worked for 15 years to get a chance to do.” Even so, “Fight Song” was a big-enough hit that the deal was a win-win: Columbia recouped its investment “many times over,” while Platten says she made enough money from her stake (not to mention her 65 percent ownership of the song’s publishing rights) to transform her life. But the song was also intensely personal, and she occasionally wonders what might’ve happened if she’d never signed a deal.

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’s Version), 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 “Taylor’s Versions” 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 “Fight Song” was at its peak; both then and now, Platten has credited Swift for opening the door for her. “I’m grateful to @TaylorSwift for bringing this conversation to light and empowering artists to take back control over their work, their stories, and their futures,” she wrote on Instagram 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’t been a surge of musicians who have rushed to rerecord their music in the wake of Swift’s project. Considering the various calculations involved, it seems unlikely that we’ll see one.

Swift wasn’t 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, Blondie, and JoJo all released new versions of music previously recorded for a label to wrest back ownership. In a 1999 interview with Paper, Prince explained his rationale for rereleasing his iconic hit “1999” from his EP 1999 the New Masters under his own label, New Power Generation. “I wanted to buy my masters back from Warner Bros. They said no way. So I’m going to rerecord them. All of them,” he said. “Now you will have two catalogs with pretty much exactly the same music — except mine will be better — and you can either give your money to WB, the big company, or to NPG.” (The New Masters EP peaked at 150 on the U.S. Billboard 200, 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.)

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’d included on the intro to their song “Gone” and tracking down producer Matt Beckley to ask him to re-create a laugh he let out when they were recording “Ammunition.” For them, it was less about the direct-revenue opportunity — “You’re talking about a very small percent of an artist’s income,” drummer Chad Butler says of the songs’ royalties, even with the band’s increased share — 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 “poster on Spotify.” (The band briefly discussed rerecording their second-most popular album, Nothing Is Sound, but “I don’t know that we’ll ever do that again,” says vocalist Jon Foreman.)

Platten’s fan base isn’t as rabid as Swift’s (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 — especially with the royalty share she’s entitled to as the songs’ sole rightsholder — could add up. In 2025, estimates say that 1 million streams on Spotify generate $4,370 in royalties. That’s split between rightsholders (56 percent), the streaming service (30 percent), and publishers/songwriters (14 percent), per a 2024 report conducted by consulting firm MIDIA Research. As a 17 percent rightsholder of the original version song of “Fight Song,” 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).

Outside of streaming royalties, Platten hopes to offset some of her investment (she wouldn’t 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 “Fight Song” has been used by gigantic brands such as WWE, Ford, and the NFL, it could amount to a meaningful source of revenue over time. (“Your lips to God’s ears,” she jokes when asked about brands and music supervisors approaching her directly.) Even if these opportunities don’t come knocking, Platten reserves the right, as one of the song’s credited writers, to reject licensing requests for the original — 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.

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’s why labels have included time-bound “rerecording restrictions” in artists’ 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. “They immediately rerecorded their hits for the new label,” Tavern says, “and that’s when record companies were like, ‘Wait, we have to stop this.’”

Following the Everly Brothers, recording restrictions became a “boilerplate” aspect of contract negotiations. But in a post “Taylor’s Version” world, record companies have begun trying to shore up their protections. “To avoid a situation where their copyrights are being devalued in the marketplace,” 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 “the later of five years after initial commercial release or two years after contract expiration or termination.” There have even been cases where Brown has witnessed labels try to stipulate “perpetual rerecording restrictions.” Such clauses are a standard part of the catalogue-acquisition deals that have been heavily publicized in recent years thanks to the big-name artists (Bruce Springsteen, Red Hot Chili Peppers, Stevie Nicks, et al.) and eye-popping dollar figures ($500 million, $140 million, $100 million, respectively) attached. “I don’t believe a buyer would feel comfortable entering into a deal with an artist for the sale of their music assets without a rerecord restriction,” Brown says. “If you’re 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.”

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’s Lisa are increasingly opting to negotiate time-bound licensing deals, 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, 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 “kind of falling over themselves to get an artist under contract so that they can make income from them before their song stops going viral,” says Tavern, but they have to protect themselves from these artists’ rerecording their songs because of how easy it is for a new version to be uploaded as a “sound” on TikTok and go viral all over again.

Platten’s rerecording restriction for Wildfire didn’t exceed eight years, so nothing prevented her from releasing Fight Song (Rachel’s Version). She posits that there might be a few disgruntled folks in “the legal department or finance department” at Columbia but says she’s otherwise received nothing but encouragement from her former colleagues. It’s not hard for the label to maintain its artist-friendly face in this instance. As of writing, the rerecorded tracks on Fight Song (Rachel’s Version) have just over 800,000 streams on Spotify, and the album didn’t crack the Billboard Hot 200. Barring an unexpected TikTok resurgence — a phenomenon that famously made Kate Bush $2.3 million dollars after Stranger Things repopularized “Running Up the Hill” in 2022 — the revenue generated by the rerecordings is unlikely to be a balance-sheet game-changer for a company Columbia’s size. Fight Song (Rachel’s 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’t make practical sense to spend time rerecording music — not 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.

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. “These copyrights are deeply personal to the artists who have put all of their creative energy into them,” he says. “It’s a sense of recapturing what was once theirs.” Swift didn’t 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’s Waves, flopped, and she was deprioritized. Eight years later, she’s looking to regain some control to set an example for her young daughters.

“‘Fight Song’ is literally about reclaiming your voice,” she says. “Now it belongs to me again. How much more can I live that message?”