Again and again I keep noticing big name artist giving up their royalties, more often then not the reasoning stated is because they're only making pennies by the time it gets to them anyway. Most recently it Britney Spears, though it doesn't reveal the reason why this time...
Britney Spears Sells Music Catalog, Other Rights to Primary Wave
https://variety.com/2026/music/news/britney-spears-sells-music-catalog-primary-wave-1236658728/
"... Details were unclear —and likely under iron-clad non-disclosure agreements — but TMZ estimated the deal to be in the low nine figures. It seems safe to assume that Spears’ artist royalties and publishing rights were included in the deal. ... Sony Music owns and controls the rights to Spears’ entire recorded music catalog, so it seems likely she sold the rights to her artist royalties. ..."
With Taylor Swift there's an interesting story of when the rights to her first six albums had been sold off in 2019 without her knowledge. This completely enraged her but couldn't to do anything about it. So what she did was re-recorded all six of the albums that she lost her rights to, she referred to them as "Taylor's Version". By re-recording her albums as "Taylor’s Version," she successfully shifted fans and streaming platforms towards her new versions of the same songs/albums. This greatly diminished the commercial value of her originals which Capital records had bought. It was then that Capital offered to sell the original recordings back to her, but she refused to sign some "ironclad" nondisclosure agreement that would have prevented her from ever speaking negatively about the buyer again, essentially "silencing" her for life.
Eventually Capitol caved and Taylor bought back all six of the original albums for the $360 million Capitol had paid for them. Evidently both versions of her first six albums are popular sellers so she's essentially doubled the profit she made on those songs, since she now owns all of them again.
But perhaps it's Paul McCartney’s decades-long battle to reclaim the Beatles catalog that's the most famous battle of the sort. In 1963, McCartney and John Lennon had formed Northern Songs which later underwent some kind of a "hostile takeover" in 1969, and the controlling interest rights got sold to ATV Music without giving the band a chance to buy it first.
In 1985, for some reason ATV offered up for sale the 251 Beatles songs they owned. Somehow Michael Jackson outbid McCartney and Yoko Ono with a winning bid of $47.5 million. When McCartney confronted him, Jackson reportedly replied, "It's just business". This effectively ended their friendship. But then in 1995, Jackson sold 50% of that catalog to Sony for $95 million, and after Jackson's death, his estate sold the other 50% stake to Sony in 2016 for another $750 million.
Now here's where it gets interesting, Instead of buying the rights back on the open market, McCartney used Section 304(c) of the US Copyright Act of 1976. This "reversion" right allows songwriters to reclaim their copyrights 56 years after they were first published. So McCartney sued Sony in 2017 to honor his "termination notices" as they came due (starting with "Love Me Do" in 2018).
McCartney and Sony reached a "confidential private settlement". that allowed McCartney to gradually regain his 50% share of the publishing rights for the US market as each song hits its 56-year mark, the last of those tracks to come up this year. As for the other 50% share, John Lennon’s estate (managed by Yoko Ono) reached a separate, long-term deal with Sony in 2009 but it keeps Lennon's share with the Sony for the full life of the copyright.