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.”
