Websites Better Back Off Revealing Sampled Music Sources

The Internet has become the ultimate source for finding which songs borrow melodies â€" or samples â€" from older tunes, but web-savvy lawyers are putting sample revealers into hiding.

For instance, at year end popular sample hound Kevin Nottingham suddenly yanked off most of his revealed sources after some parties reached out. "Let's face it, this website is an open encyclopedia for lawyers who are looking to sue producers for not clearing samples. I first realized that when I was contacted by George Clinton's lawyers a while back. They were VERY interested in the site and requested my assistance in helping complete their database of hip hop songs that sample George Clinton and Parliament Funkadelic. Quite naturally I refused and avoided further contact with them. Thankfully the issue dropped."

You may wonder what's the big deal. Since a successful 2006 lawsuit against the late Notorious B.I.G., every sampled noise in a song must be legally cleared. Take a half-second snippet of a cowbell from, say, a Blue Oyster Cult song, and legally you'd have to find the songwriters and/or the owners of the masters and/or the original performers and negotiate a contract for use before it is sold. A multilayered song could be made of dozens of samples â€" one notable Public Enemy song has an estimated two dozen pieces â€" and each cleared sample could cost several thousand dollars, if it is allowed to be used at all. As I wrote for the late Portfolio Magazine a couple years back, releasing one song can be worth hundreds of thousands of dollars to other companies, which can inhibit the creative process for smaller acts and bring in a whole sea of litigious activity.

Rap has been built on lifting and repurposing material, such as a drum break from a James Brown song or a hi-hat from a Led Zeppelin tune. However, the found art approach became much more legally contentious as rap shifted from an underground music to a billion-dollar industry and when other forms, such as pop and soul music, started sampling more in the '90s (Today, an estimated one of out five songs on the Billboard charts contains some kind of sample). Nottingham has a nice summary of one landmark case, featuring rap icon Biz Markie and a Gilbert O'Sullivan sample, but the early '90s lawsuit was just one of a dozen cases that set up our legal dynamic today.

As an artist myself, I want people to be both compensated for their work and to have the fair use freedom to experiment with other material, but now the pendulum has swung too far in the legalise direction â€" and, as Nottingham realized, these revealer websites are contributing to the problem. This isn't the case in all artforms. As an example, in my latest book Porn & Pong: How Grand Theft Auto, Tomb Raider and Other Sexy Games Changed Our Culture, I quote pop culturists Malcolm Gladwell, Steven Johnson and Eric Schlosser. It helps create context and, in a small way, is me paying homage to those who came before me. As an author, I have "fair use" of their text to help illustrate my own text. I also list their names and give the original sources in the back.

Now when it comes to music, producers will steal again (see Led Zeppelin circa 1970) and again (see Timbaland circa 2007) without attribution, but doing an overt Vanilla Ice-level theft is different than sampling the aforementioned cowbell. Because of the modern strict interpretation of the law, there is no differentiation â€" and, if well-meaning websites such as Who Sampled and The Breaks wanted to protect the very culture they want to celebrate, they would back off a bit until things get straightened out.

Otherwise, 2010 is going to be a long and litigious year for music.

Photo courtesy of http://www.flickr.com/photos/miss_yasmina/ / CC BY-SA 2.0