Saturday, April 16, 2011

A Look At Sampling And Publishing

The foundation of hip hop production came from being able to sample from artists from different musical genres such as R&B, Disco, Jazz, and Rock. From DJs using two records to restart back from a certain point on a record to the development of technology (such as Akai MPC samplers), it has become a very important aspect of the hip hop genre. It started from using such popular drum sounds (also known as drum breaks) from artists such as Clyde Stubblefield. It has been rumored that musicians such as Stubblefield have never received proper credit or compensation on some of the biggest hip hop records produced that has used pieces of his work.

With this issus, there has been on-going battle of lawsuits between hip hop artists and the copyright owners whenever samples are used without permission. De La Soul was in trouble for using portions of Sgt. Peppers on "De La Soul is Dead". Beasties Boys almost caught a very serious lawsuit from the samples used on their album "Paul's Boutique" but was able to not endure consequences like others have before. In certain instances, artists have been able to get away with sampling because of how there is not enough money made from the hip hop artist that original sampled musician can receive back.

I would suggest for anyone who is either curious about this issue of hip hop and sampling to please check out the documentary, Copyright Criminals. Not only does it give the proper background on the issue of why sampling in hip hop is popular it gives insight on the ownership of publishing. Some of these previous artists mentioned in this blog posts are very big part of this documentary. Even though this more so territory that involves legal infringements in the entertainment business, it is still a an issue that involves music publishing companies. If you look in the liner notes of hip hop albums, you can see credits now that will state sample clearance companies that have cleared any samples used on the record. Hopefully, hip hop artists would be able to use a sampling license in order to be able create more music. However, the issue at hand seems to be that artists that have been sampled from need to be paid for their contribution. As it stands, this battle of hip hop artists and sampling will not be resolved anytime soon.


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