After Five Finger Death Punch learned its original indie label, Prospect Park, had sold its master recordings without its knowledge, the veteran hard-rock band looked to Taylor Swift for inspiration. 

“She could have gone into a costly lawsuit, or she could have felt sorry for herself. [Instead] she just sprung into action and did what she had to do,” guitarist Zoltan Bathory tells Billboard. “That’s the way of life, and we will do what is necessary and legally can be done.”

Like Swift, Five Finger Death Punch is re-recording its early hits, including “Under and Over It” and “Far From Home,” and will release them in two greatest hits albums, beginning with Best Of, Volume 1, due July 19. “She got them to think a little bit about what their rights were,” says the band’s manager, Allen Kovac of 10th Street Entertainment. “They want to be able to determine how these songs are promoted, marketed, licensed, visualized.”

Since Kovac took over Five Finger Death Punch’s management roughly 15 years ago, he and the band have been locked in a battle with Prospect Park and its founder, longtime artist manager Jeff Kwatinetz. Kovac says Kwatinetz, who launched Limp Bizkit, Korn and many others beginning in the 1990s and still manages Limp Bizkit and Ice Cube, signed the band to “the worst deal I’ve ever seen.” According to Kovac, Kwatinetz took 50% of the band’s touring, publishing and merchandising revenues and promised a 50-50 joint venture in which the band “never had ownership and they thought they did.”

Several of the Prospect Park productions were hits. These include 2013’s The Wrong Side of Heaven … Volume 1 and 2015’s Got Your Six, which both peaked at No. 2 on the Billboard 200, and 2011’s American Capitalist, which landed at No. 3. But though “they did very well, financially,” says Kovac, “on the record side, [the band] kept seeing less and less money.” He adds that Five Finger Death Punch had to make a deal with Kwatinetz promising two new albums in exchange for control of touring, merch and publishing. 

In 2016, Prospect Park filed a lawsuit against Five Finger Death Punch, accusing the band of attempting to rush-release a “mediocre studio album” while “shamelessly attempting to cash in before the anticipated downfall of their addicted bandmate,” a reference to singer Ivan Moody, who had publicly disclosed his alcohol-addiction issues. The band and the label settled in 2017, but, Kwatinetz tells Billboard, Kovac stopped cooperating with his company, so “I sold my half.” 

Kwatinetz declined to report who bought his half of the joint venture between the band and the label, or the sale date, due to a non-disclosure agreement. Kovac identifies the company as Spirit Music Group, which lists Five Finger Death Punch on the “masters catalogs” section of its website, although Spirit reps declined to comment on the band’s status with the company. “He never contacted the band to tell them he was selling,” Kovac says. “He didn’t even give them the opportunity to go to the bank, get a down payment and pay him with assets from their side.”

“Allen’s allegations, as usual, are utterly false,” Kwatinetz responds. “We took a band no one else wanted to sign [and] made them the most-played band at active rock for over a decade. The band made millions and millions of dollars, had nine or 10 gold or platinum records. Allen’s intent was always to try to break the contract so he could put it out on his own label.”

Kwatinetz adds that he’s “glad” the band is re-recording its earlier tracks, because the re-recorde  versions of “I Refuse” (featuring Maria Brink, singer of metal band In This Moment), “Jekyll and Hyde” and a cover of Bad Company‘s “Bad Company,” from the forthcoming Volume 1, have given “a boost in airplay and streaming to all of the original recordings.” 

Five Finger Death Punch’s dispute with its early label is similar to Swift’s. In 2019, the superstar publicly expressed her outrage when Scooter Braun, Justin Bieber‘s manager, bought the Nashville record company Big Machine Label Group, which had released her original recordings. Angered that control of her catalog went to Braun, who’d worked with Kanye West — with whom Swift has had a notoriously rocky relationship — she tried and failed to buy back the masters from Braun, then Shamrock Capital, which later purchased her masters for $300 million. But on May 30, after re-recording four of her first six albums and marketing them as “Taylor’s Versions,” Swift announced she had purchased the masters from Shamrock for an undisclosed price.

Other artists, including Wheatus, Bowling for Soup and Switchfoot, have also re-recorded original material, and credited Swift for educating fans on the business reasons for doing so — allowing them, for example, to keep any licensing fees from movies and commercials. Five Finger Death Punch’s re-recordings coincide with its 20th anniversary, which Bathory calls a “coincidence,” and says: “I don’t want to say the obvious — the lemons are being made into lemonade — but basically that’s what happened.”

By phone from the band’s Las Vegas home base, Bathory adds that Five Finger Death Punch members did not follow Swift’s meticulous approach to making sure most of the new “Taylor’s Versions” resembled the originals. The band re-recorded their parts in separate studios, beginning in February, then mailed them to each other to combine them later — a procedure that is considerably easier than coming up with entirely new songs. “This process is pretty quick,” he says. “Some of these songs we’ve played 1 million times.”

“It’s important for songwriters to understand that they already have the power to strike,” David Israelite, president/CEO of the National Music Publishers’ Association (NMPA), said at the organization’s annual meeting on June 11.

Speaking to a room of some of the most powerful music executives and songwriters in the business, Israelite’s annual speech is seen as a state of the union address for music publishing — and it also often includes a rousing call to action. This year, as new royalty opportunities and negotiations with AI companies and other tech platforms lay on the horizon, Israelite focused much of his remarks on how the music business can begin to work together to ensure better payments for songwriters in the future. 

But in an industry as fractured as music, is that really possible?

As Israelite himself pointed out, songwriters are not able to unionize — the National Labor Relations Board ruled them independent contractors, and thus not eligible for union status, in 1984. But his point about songwriters’ ability to band together to stand up for better treatment is still correct. In their own way, songwriters could “strike” because they have “the power to say no” and walk away when Big Tech wants to license music at subpar rates. 

Israelite explained later in his remarks, though, that often when music companies representing songwriters push back on Big Tech for better rates, “songwriters don’t stick together” with their representatives fighting for the better pay. Israelite also called upon “artists and their teams” to stand with songwriters in their plight, noting that “without a healthy songwriter economy, the entire system suffers.”

Often, the music business looks longingly to Hollywood, which is built on a deep respect for unions and solidarity with their fellow workers, an underpinning that music largely doesn’t have. Last year, when the Screenwriters Guild of America decided to strike in pursuit of better working conditions, their colleagues in other movie trades stood by them, even though it meant halting thousands of jobs and projects for the largely working-class people of the industry. Eventually, actors also joined in with their own strike. The result was improved protections around AI, minimum writers room sizes and bonuses for actors due to the success of made-for-streaming titles. 

Why is it that the music industry is always divided and stuck in a race to the bottom while it seems those in the film/TV business are holding hands in solidarity? One important reason is that film and music are two very different art forms, and thus, very different businesses. The comparisons only go so far.

Every film that gets made is the result of at least a few million dollars, a number of corporate sign offs, endless permits, years of development and the artisanal labor of dozens-to-hundreds of people. The resulting artwork may be marketed by pointing out its biggest star, but it’s easy to see that these works are team efforts, and even the biggest egos in the room know they couldn’t do it on their own. Viewers know it, too — when a movie-goer sees Martin Scorsese’s Killers of the Flower Moon, they know it was not just the result of the genius of Scorsese, but also Leonardo DiCaprio’s acting, perfect costuming, expert set design and the bestselling book from which it was adapted.

To put it simply, everyone sees film as a team sport — but music is seen as an individual one, and many artists these days want the bragging rights of having done all the creative work themselves. Of course, the reality is that today’s average Hot 100 hit has two-to-five songwriters, at least one producer and a recording artist, not to mention session musicians or other contributors. But the sheer fact that one could technically do it alone remains imprinted in the minds of musicians and their fans.

This individualistic mindset is furthered when one considers that a song, even if it was written with 20 other people, is marketed and sold as the extension of the recording artist alone — and as if it is a peek into their soul. Listeners don’t want to think that one artist’s new breakup anthem was really based on one of her producers’ relationships, not hers, or that another’s new hit was pitched to her by a group of songwriters she’s never met. Artists are the sole public salespeople and face of the songs, and if the song succeeds, its triumph is almost always publicly attributed to the artist.

But if the song fails, it’s also seen as all their fault — even if it was actually their A&R who pushed them to choose that single. It’s an enormous amount of pressure that often forces recording artists to think like cutthroat entrepreneurs fighting it out in a wildly competitive space, not members of a collective artistic class that can achieve better results if they stick together. (Meanwhile, Dakota Johnson has a good argument that the box office bomb that was Madame Web wasn’t entirely her fault).

With that in mind, it’s no surprise that during the latest chance musicians had to stand together with a company for better pay, it didn’t go smoothly. Last year, Universal Music Group decided to pull its catalog off TikTok, to fight for the “fair value” of music. The company also expressed concerns about AI and artist safety on the platform. 

Yet some of its top talent did not stand in solidarity with them: artists like Ariana Grande, Olivia Rodrigo, Beyoncé (who worked with a UMPG songwriter on “Texas Hold Em”) and Taylor Swift found savvy ways to get back on the platform so they could continue to market the songs and albums they had slated for that period. Non-UMG artists asked their UMPG songwriters to not submit their metadata to streaming and social media services until the ban lifted — effectively foregoing all payment indefinitely — so that their songs could continue to stay on TikTok. All of that undercut artists’ and writers’ own financial interests in the long term in the hope of TikTok virality in the short term.

For artists, the pressure and risk of losing the audience for their art or ruining the momentum of a campaign was too high to stand with UMG, which didn’t give them a heads up that this was going to happen. The same thing went for the writers who supported them. Apparently, some top UMG signees were given a few days of warning about the TikTok boycott, but it still wasn’t enough time to halt album campaigns that were already in motion. 

UMG had good intentions — getting a higher royalty from TikTok — but it put its artists in a tough spot: One album flop and an artist can leave the zeitgeist forever. One album flop and the tour the artist already booked doesn’t sell. One album flop and they never sell their vinyl inventory. One album flop… and UMG could drop them!

If the music industry tries to pursue a voluntary strike or boycott for fairer rates again, it also must contend with the added challenge that the three major music companies are publicly traded, and may not have a long-term appetite for financial suffering. Forget about the artists’ and songwriters’ issues for a second — are the music companies ready to stand up with creatives in a strike that lasts for more than one financial quarter? 

The trick to getting a non-unionized push for better remuneration to happen, and to achieve industry-wide solidarity with that push, is rooted in greater communication. When I think of a successful, widespread coalition in music, I think of the passage of the Music Modernization Act (MMA) in 2018, which brought together multiple groups in the music business to support the much-needed bill.

Not everyone got exactly what they wanted from the MMA, but practically everyone agrees that life after the MMA is better than life before it. It wasn’t a strike, but this coalition building, spearheaded in part by the NMPA itself, could help inform a voluntary strike in the future. 

The main difference was that without the MMA, millions of dollars were left on the table due to passive attribution and credit information, and it took the industry negotiating with itself to solve it; any collective action against a Big Tech company, on the other hand, would require active collaboration by the majority against an entity that may be paying some royalties to some participants, even if others feel like it is not enough.

It’s going to be a hard road to get the music industry to treat each other like comrades and not competitors. As Israelite notes, “this is not an easy conversation” to have. Music is not film, and it never will be, but it doesn’t mean headway is impossible.

Prince Royce celebrates his first No. 1 from his new album, Eterno, as “How Deep Is Your Love” leads Billboard’s Latin Airplay chart. The song completes the trek in 10 weeks, after a 2-1 jump on the ranking dated June 28.

“How Deep Is Your Love,” a bilingual bachata version of the Bee Gee’s three-week champ on the overall Billboard Hot 100 (1977), is the first single off Royce’s eighth studio album, Eterno, which debuted and peaked at No. 3 on the Top Tropical Albums chart (dated May 31). It takes over the Latin Airplay chart after a 23% gain in audience impressions, to 9.9 million, earned in the United States during the June 13-19 tracking week, according to Luminate. The song moves ahead with the Greatest Gainer honor –awarded weekly to the track with the largest audience growth among the 50 songs on the chart.

With “How Deep Is Your Love,” Royce achieves his 18th Latin Airplay No. 1, extending his mark among tropical acts with the second-most chart-toppers. He trails only Romeo Santos, who leads with 22 champs, the most in the history of the 30-year-old tally. Here is a review of those tropical acts and their No. 1s:

“How Deep Is Your Love” drives Royce to his 25th No. 1 on Tropical Airplay, likely after a 2-1 climb. He continues third among all artists on the chart, trailing only Marc Anthony, who holds the record with 37 No. 1 hits, and Victor Manuelle with 29.

Elsewhere, the song becomes the highest weekly debut on the multimetric Hot Latin Songs chart, where it opens at No. 41.

After topping Billboard‘s rock charts with 2025 anniversary album Three Cheers for Sweet Revenge (Deluxe Edition), My Chemical Romance has announced a five-date South American tour scheduled for early 2026.

The emo heavyweight will visit Colombia, Peru, Chile, Argentina and Brazil, with Swedish band The Hives as special guests.

The band’s upcoming 10-date North American stadium tour in 2025 will focus on 2006 album The Black Parade, a set the group re-released in 2016 to celebrate its 10th anniversary. The New Jersey rock band will kick off the tour on July 11 in Seattle, make a stop in Los Angeles and wrap up on Sept. 13 in Tampa, Fla.

In an Instagram post, the teaser for My Chemical Romance’s South American tour uses “Helena” — which peaked at No. 33 on the Billboard Hot 100 in 2005 — as its soundtrack. It’s a song from Three Cheers for Sweet Revenge (2004), which could hint at a different focus in the setlist compared to the North American tour.

Three Cheers for Sweet Revenge was the album that marked the band’s major breakthrough in 2004, returning to the No. 1 spot on the Top Rock & Alternative Albums, Top Rock Albums and Top Alternative Albums charts dated June 21. The album also hit the top 10 for the first time (reentering at No. 6) on the all-genre Billboard 200 after its deluxe reissue.

Fans can find ticket information on My Chemical Romance’s website.

See My Chemical Romance’s tour dates below.