Do they get all of the royalty/publishing/songwriting rights back?
In: Other
It has more to do with who has the rights to the recordings (aka “the masters”), which are often separate from the songwriting copyright and the publishing rights.
It depends on what relationship the artist has with their label; for major label artists, the label often pays for the recordings and therefore usually owns the rights to them thereafter. Sometimes though, the artist owns the rights to the recordings and licenses them to a label. This was not the case with Taylor Swift’s first few records, it seems.
When the artist doesn’t own their masters, whoever does own them can do whatever they want with them, like re-release them and repackage them, and the artist might not get royalties from sales anymore. Bands like Ween, Presidents of the United States of America and Soul Coughing (as well as others; those are just off the top of my head) have all had “best of” compilations of their old songs released without their input.
Sometimes a band wants to re-release an old album but the recordings are owned by someone else, who won’t hand them over or charges too much for the licensing or selling them back outright. So the band decides to re-record them so they own *those* recordings and release that. This has happened with Chixdiggit, the Subhumans and Suicidal Tendencies. Devo has been known to re-record old songs of theirs just for use in commercials (like when “Whip It” was changed to “Swiff It” for a Swiffer commercial) so they can collect as much royalties as possible.
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