Long before Taylor Swift decided to re-record all her original songs, including the “Taylor’s Version” of 2010’s Speak Now which was released last week, Frank Sinatra did the same thing. So did Chuck Berry. And Elmo Shropshire. And many of the classic pop and rock stars who have licensed new versions of their best-known songs to movies, TV shows and commercials to keep all the royalty money over the years.
Artists re-record old hits for several different reasons: Movie and TV productions can pay them rather than their original record labels when licensing songs; they can update the tracks to sound more modern, with newer technology; they can revisit older recordings that were never properly available digitally due to contract disputes, as JoJo did; or, as with Swift, they’re having a dispute with the original label and prefer to put master recordings solely under their own control. “Our thinking was, if we do these now, they’ll be around as long as the originals, and whenever the opportunity arises, we can say, ‘Look, we’ll give you this,’ and we can undercut what whoever owns our masters are asking for,” Squeeze‘s Glenn Tilbrook told Billboard in 2019, nine years after the band put out its re-recorded greatest-hits album Spot the Difference.
Yet no one has earned as much attention — or revenue — for re-recording their songs as Swift. At first, Swift’s announcement that she would put out new versions of all her old hits seemed idiosyncratic, a retaliatory move against Justin Bieber and Ariana Grande manager Scooter Braun, who bought her six-album catalog as part of his 2019 acquisition of indie label Big Machine. But she quickly rolled out new versions of 2008’s Fearless and 2012’s Red with faithful re-recordings, fresh remixes and “from the vault” material and turned the exercise into lucrative hits: Fearless (Taylor’s Version) and Red (Taylor’s Version) have racked up 1.49 billion and 2.83 billion streams, respectively, according to Luminate, and combined sales of nearly 1.7 million units. Swift is now at the forefront of a wave of artists that have or plan to release their own re-recordings, including TLC, Wheatus, Paris Hilton and, possibly soon, Ashanti. “It’s a chance to make money, actually, for the end musicians,” says David Amels, a producer, engineer and session musician who helped Shangri-Las singer Mary Weiss re-record some of the band’s classic hits as a 2007 solo album.
In 2005, TLC negotiated a separation agreement from its longtime label, Sony Music, and re-recorded its ’90s R&B hits “Creep,” “Waterfalls” and “No Scrubs.” They first came out in the 2013 VH1 biopic CrazySexyCool: The TLC Story — without the band’s late third member, Lisa “Left Eye” Lopes. The two-woman band has recently spiked in popularity, according to its longtime manager, Bill Diggins, playing a well-received set last year at the Glastonbury festival, and it plans to “start building distribution infrastructures for the new re-records.” But it wasn’t until January 2023 that singers Tionne “T-Boz” Watkins and Rozonda “Chilli” Thomas released the re-recorded versions on streaming services, without promotion or fanfare.
Although the group followed Swift’s lead in parenthetically subtitling each re-recording “(TLC Version),” Diggins says the move to re-record wasn’t inspired by Swift. “We have the utmost respect for Taylor Swift,” he says. “However, we did the re-records long before Taylor released hers and the ‘TLC Version’ was not referencing a homage to Taylor.” Still, Diggins acknowledges TLC lacks Swift’s music-business clout and massive fan army — after Red (Taylor’s Version) came out in November 2021, iHeartRadio announced its radio stations would switch to playing the new versions of her hits, but the top broadcasting company has made no such promise to TLC. “It’s not as simple as calling Spotify or Apple or iHeart and saying, ‘Play our re-records.’ You have to have enormous power to do that — which Taylor Swift certainly does,” Diggins says. “The minute you do that, the record label that owns the copyright is going to put pressure on the streaming service to play their version, because they want to collect the royalties.”
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Sony owns the rights to Lopes’ voice, according to Diggins, so TLC did not have the option of splicing in original recordings of the late star. But he argues the new versions are stronger vocally because Watkins and Thomas have spent the last three decades not smoking, not drinking, leading healthy lifestyles and providing “a little bit more of new authenticity.” Still, while the new versions employed the same engineers and studios as the originals, the three tracks have been streamed a combined 218,000 times, compared to nearly 1.6 billion total for the ’90s classics — including 114 million streams for the original songs since the new versions came out in January. In the last seven months, the original versions of those three TLC hits have generated $675,725, while the re-recordings have added up to just $1,394, according to Billboard estimates.
A year ago, Ashanti told Billboard she obtained the rights to re-record her early albums from Universal Music Group and was working on a new version of her 2002 self-titled debut. (Her reps did not respond to a request for an update.) “Certain people don’t want to see you move forward and progress in life so they try to create roadblocks,” she said at the time. “I love what Taylor Swift did. Anything worth something will be a bit of a battle.”
In June, three years after pop star Kim Petras covered Paris Hilton’s 2006 hit “Stars Are Blind” on a livestream, the duo collaborated for a re-recording, with original producer and co-writer Fernando Garibay at Hilton’s studio, calling it “Paris’ Version” a la Swift. They did it for “fun, musically and creatively,” says Alex Frankel, Hilton’s music manager, adding that, from a business point of view, “It kind of aligned with my thinking.” (As with TLC, Hilton’s “Paris’ Version” subtitle was not a homage to Swift, at least overtly: “I don’t think it was a conscious choice, just felt natural, but of course probably an unconscious nod to the always iconic TS,” Frankel says.)
Hilton was “stuck with one of those contracts” with Warner Music, according to Frankel, who wouldn’t say whether Warner imposed a no-re-recording clause in her original contract: “Trying to recoup on that is nearly impossible on those deals, and the term is infinite. No one wronged her, she wasn’t doing it to spite anyone, it was more, ‘Why not revisit the song or create equity on the master side of the recording?’” The new version of “Stars Are Blind” has been streamed 699,000 times, compared to 28.3 million total for the original; since the new version’s release, the original has been streamed 726,000 times, according to Luminate. Billboard estimates the original master recording of Hilton’s track has generated nearly $4,000 for the Hilton Hotels heiress since the new version came out, while the Petras collaboration has landed roughly $5,300.
Outside of Swift, perhaps the most successful contemporary re-recording is Wheatus’ “Teenage Dirtbag,” which began as what singer Brendan Brown calls a “forensic and tedious-as-hell” project to perfectly recreate the band’s 1999 alt-rock debut, Wheatus, after, he alleges, original label Sony Music lost the ADAT masters. (A Sony rep declined to comment.) The band employed old photos to determine what gear it used 20 years earlier and puzzled over a “blip blip blip” sound in two verses that turned out to be a push-button phone tone filtered through a keyboard. “This was a CSI episode recreating some shit that happened 20 years ago that we don’t really remember,” Brown says.
After Wheatus finished the project in April 2020, and reissued the three-song EP as Teenage Dirtbag 2020 / Mope, the COVID-19 pandemic led to a TikTok-Instagram viral resurgence — “Teenage Dirtbag” became the soundtrack for celebrities reminiscing with photos of themselves in the old days. As a result, although the new version didn’t come close to the 236.6 million streams of the 1999 original, it has been streamed a respectable 4.5 million times. Meanwhile, since the new version came out, the master recording has generated a decent amount of revenue for Brown — about $24,400, according to Billboard estimates, though the original — thanks to the TikTok boost — racked up nearly $664,000 during the same period.
“We never said, ‘Listen to this, not to that.’ We just told people what we’d done and why we’d done it,” Brown says. “There was no public relations, there was no publicist. The press came to us and the conversation kind of bloomed.”
Swift is “partly responsible” for that conversation, Brown says. “There are a lot more questions about creative regulation and laws and ownership that used to be very under the hood and are now being discussed out in the open. If you have a talk show, and you’re on YouTube, it’s like, ‘I have to learn about intellectual-property law now?’ This is what we’re doing.”
Additional reporting by Ed Christman.
