Here’s a selection of obscure artists ripe for sampling. It appears some people weren’t very happy with our guest post on Classic Artists Made For Hip-Hop Samples. That’s fair enough. It goes without saying everyone’s entitled to their opinion, including the person who wrote the article. But then we thought… how about obscure artists? The kind that most producers don’t even remember they’ve sampled so…
We have a special guest editorial from Point Blank Electronic Music School and it’s all about sampling. Sampling is the use of someone else’s recording within your own to create something new. It can range from lifting sections of drums or other isolated instruments to entire musical ideas and right down to milliseconds of material. It’s such a common technique that we’ve developed instruments to…
German music pioneers Kraftwerk have lost their battle over an uncleared sample. In what could be a landmark ruling at least in Germany, a sampling lawsuit went the way of the sampler rather than the sampled. The case was related to a ban on the sale of the song “Nur mir (Only to me)” by Moses Pelham and Sabrina Setlur, which sampled Kraftwerk’s “Metal On…
Thanks to musicologist Amanda Sewell, we have some academic papers on the subject of sampling. Sampling is synonymous with interactive technology. The pressing of pads on an MPC or Maschine, the splicing of audio on a DAW or even the manual pausing on cassette. But we don’t really see many books or papers on the subject. Amanda Sewell, a musicologist from Indiana University has written…
There’s no escape from accusations of copyright infringement, even for one of the most gifted musicians the world has ever. Here’s a 3-hour cut of Michael Jackson’s 1993 deposition held in Mexico, centred around supposed plagiarism of “The Girl Is Mine”, “Thriller” and “We Are the World”. This might be a heavy watch but for MJ fans or general music fans wanting a glimpse into…
Back in 2005, music downloads were still in their infancy. Here’s a video from ’05 on how to download music legally thanks to BBC’s Short Change. I was 14 when I bought my first MP3 player. I saved up my pocket money for an entire month to buy a little 128MB unbranded player that came with two Whitney Houston songs (no idea why) but before…
It’s Leftover Links time and we’re looking into the wonderful world of synths, samples and drum machines thanks to articles from HipHopDX, RBMA and The Guardian. You’d be hard pressed to find three things to have revolutionised music as much as sampling, synthesizers and drum machines. Since the 80s, they have featured in most of the music we listen to in some form or another…
The sampling lawsuit involving Frank Ocean’s Super Rich Kids is a little more entangled than you might think. Oh joy, another sample lawsuit. This one involves singer Frank Ocean and his track Super Rich Kids, his label UMG and TuffAmerica, a label from New York. Based on that premise, it’s appears to be a simple “you sampled without permission, we want money” exercise. Except it…
Filmmaker Brett Gaylor and mashup extraordinaire Girl Talk journey through the world of copyright in RiP! A Remix Manifesto. There have been far too many sample-based lawsuits in the news over the past year or so, mostly from musicians who can afford to clear the music they use. For artists like Girl Talk (real name Gregg Michael Gillis), sampling and “mashups” are how he made…
Good and bad news, Samplefacers: copyright law has been extended from 50 years to 70 years in the UK. Joining the bandwagon of the USA, the copyright law in the UK has been extended to 70 years after an author’s death or between 90 and 120 years in some cases. This is due in part to lobbying over the past few years with the stance…
