9 ms·

The Economics Of Girl Talk

118 points by nthitz 14y ago

peter_l_downs 14y ago
I love this series of analyses — they're always interesting and well-written. I'm not sure who at Priceonomics made the decision "Yes, let's spend time writing about interesting things", but I think it's great.
- anigbrowl 14y ago
  It's a great analysis, but I do take issue with some parts of the argumet: The result is a broken system that impairs the ability of young producers to make music without taking huge legal risks. Music based heavily on sampling others' work, for sure - sample clearance is an expensive nightmare and should be cheaper, perhaps compulsory, and more transparent and accessible. But you don't have to make music that way. You can sing and play a regular instrument, for example - and don't get started on the argument that there's nothing new under the sun, and that all basslines, drum rhythms etc. consist of ripping off someone else's idea. Musical quotation is widespread, but there is a huge different between coming up with your own riff that sounds a bit like your favorite band and just sampling the original. Furthermore, there's no special reason that sampling has to involve others' work. My main tool is a sampler but I hardly ever sample other people, and when i do it's usually a line from a movie or something, and done more for personal amusement. I would never, ever sample another musician's track and use it in my own music. It's not that it makes me morally superior, I just don't want to do that, because it would feel like I was just surfing on what they did because I couldn't come up with something cool on my own. I don't even care for using royalty-free sample loops of drum breaks or pead sounds for the same reason, although I will use one occasionally. What I do sample is going into the kitchen and making recordings of household implements as percussion, my cats' miaows, sounds in my neighborhood, or my own voice or snippets stuff I'm playing out of synthesizers. For me, it's a lot more fun to come up with my own drum beats or suchlike, sample those, and then start warping the audio to my heart's content. I'm not saying that this makes me a better musician or a better person than people who build records entirely out of samples - I'm not into Girl Talk but there are quite a few artists who work mainly with samples of others' stuff whose work I admire and enjoy. I'm just pointing out that that you can in fact go nuts with your sampler without ever having to deal with copyright clearance or infringement issues.
  - vacri 14y ago
    Yeah, it's hardly a broken system just because you want to make money from the cool riffs that other people came up with, all without paying them a cent. If you're sampling someone else, then you're effectively making them a co-author of your material - and they should be due royalties for that, just like if you covered their song. How many mixes have we heard where the signature is the sample and the chaff is the stuff surrounding it? In any case, if the samples really were trivial and not worth kicking back money... then they wouldn't be sampled in the first place :)
    - anigbrowl 14y ago
      How many mixes have we heard where the signature is the sample and the chaff is the stuff surrounding it? That's a great point. One song the article mentioned that epitomized this was the Puff Daddy 'Missing you' song. The sentiment was worthwhile, and I can also see it within the musical tradition of rap and the soundsystem aesthetic where musicians develop their MCing skills by rapping over over a sampled loop in their bedroom/the garage etc. so to build a whole song over a single looped sample with a minimum of additional production elements actually served a musical function of evoking nostalgia for 'the way things used to be' when the people in question were young and just learning how to rap. But it ended up sounding like a complete lift of someone else's song, and while the licensing was probably taken care of in this case it's spawned thousands of imitations with even less musical novelty.
- steveklabnik 14y ago
  If you enjoy this kind of thing, I'd suggest longform.org and gwern.net.
  - peter_l_downs 14y ago
    Already reading longform; just checked out gwern and it looks great. Thanks for the recommendation!
joezydeco 14y ago
If you want to go farther down the rabbit hole, this is an excellent 20-minute video about the history of the Amen Break, the "six-second clip that spawned several entire subcultures" and the rise of sampling: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5SaFTm2bcac http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5SaFTm2bcac
- gfody 14y ago
  fascinating video - curious I searched for Amen Break on whosampled.com and it returned a list of 789 tracks: http://www.whosampled.com/sampled/The%20Winstons/ http://www.whosampled.com/sampled/The%20Winstons/
  - meatsock 14y ago
    i estimate that number to be off by tenfold or more
deleted 14y ago
[deleted]
masonhensley 14y ago
Girl Talk and other DJ's, remixers, samplers, whatever you want to call them make their money from performances. I was kinda hoping the article talked more about that aspect of their business. Basically all their mix tapes are promotion for the live events. When I was a Junior/Senior (2009-2010) at Vanderbilt, I was VP of the programming board that arranged speakers, concerts, homecoming, comedians and other campus events and activities. We had Girl Talk come and while the price was not 6-figure crazy like what Acivii[1] charges these days, I was hit with sticker shock big time. [1] http://www.gq.com/entertainment/music/201304/avicii-tim-bergling-profile-gq-april-2013 http://www.gq.com/entertainment/music/201304/avicii-tim-berg...
- _delirium 14y ago
  It's also easier, at least in the U.S., to do more liberal sampling when live than on recordings, since you don't have to clear the samples individually. Most music venues have a blanket license for performance rights with the main rights organizations, which clears the rights for live use of just about anything: stuff like the venue playing a CD as background music during intermission, a band playing a cover song on stage, or a DJ playing tracks or remixing samples.
- hello_newman 14y ago
  "Basically all their mixtapes are promotion for the live events." I think that is a great model, personally. I want artists to not care about getting rich off of downloads. I think it's great when artists ranging from Deadmau5, Lil Wayne or Wiz Khalifa, release mixtapes for free. That seems to be the "artist" mentality, fuck getting paid; I'm doing this (making music) because I love doing this. It shows passion, commitment to their craft, and a true level of artistry. You could even argue the same thing for developers who release their apps for free because they want everyone to enjoy it regardless of price. I obviously want artists to make as much money as possible, so releasing great mixtapes does make me, personally, want to go see their concerts. It seems to be a great way to market yourself and with labels taking so much from artists anyway, the place where most new artists make money is touring and live shows. I don't want to go to a concert wear essentially the artist is just playing their latest CD to a crowd of people.
deleted 14y ago
[deleted]
rlu 14y ago
Ah, funny coming to HN and clicking and then reading this article while listening to Super Mash Bros's 20 minute "Pure Fix Mix"[1]. Anyways, only half way done with the article but quite good so far. 1: https://soundcloud.com/super-mash-bros/pure-fix-mix https://soundcloud.com/super-mash-bros/pure-fix-mix
lifeisstillgood 14y ago
I'm a little old fashioned here - but sampling is about as simple copyright breach as you get - its cut and paste. However, if I were a record company and the top google search for a day was a skinny kid who has audiences full of screaming target demographics, no amount of cocaine on prostitutes would be too great till I had him signed in a contract Fautus would consider a bit on the restrictive side. Mumbling about how unfair it is to not be able to copy other people's work without paying them is a bit disingenuous, but if I owned those copyrights then this guy is a great way to get more out of the back catalog.
- nthitz 14y ago
  > In the UK, one producer sued the dance group MIAIRIRIS for sampling his work. Although the song was a top ten hit, he had no idea it sampled his song until a member of MIAIRIRIS mentioned it on the radio. It had been manipulated beyond recognition. I don't think it's always a simple cut and paste. The article mentions Puff Daddy's "I'll Be Missing You" sampling the Police, or The Beastie Boys sampling Led Zeppelin or the Beatles. You might listen to some of these songs and have no idea about the original. One time I was at a party and Kanye's 'Harder Better Faster Stronger' came on. I remember saying "I didn't know Kanye sampled Daft Punk" and someone replying something along the lines of "nah this is all original Kanye"
  - 286c8cb04bda 14y ago
    > the dance group MIAIRIRIS That's not 'I', it's '|' -- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MARRS http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MARRS
    - nthitz 14y ago
      Oh thanks! I just c+p'ed from the article, goes to show you, it's just not that simple! :)
  - lifeisstillgood 14y ago
    I was trying to emphasise that there is a qualitative difference between copying by children in bedrooms and copying by professionals or wannabe professionals. Alter copyright law is probably never going to happen in time, but market driven compromises will fix a lot of things
mikecane 14y ago
Keep in mind while reading this the takedowns of YouTube videos that just happened to have music playing in the background incidentally to the subject (Baby doing something cute, Mom grabs cellphone while radio is playing a song in the background in her otherwise real life, and begins taking a video of the kid).
joshontheweb 14y ago
We're hoping to address this issue at Soundkeep. Copyright reform is definitely needed, but creative commons is a great work-around. http://alpha.soundkeep.com http://alpha.soundkeep.com Beta coming soon!
lazyBilly 14y ago
I think you gotta pay the original artist. As an old-school analog musician, I had to sweat for literally decades to be able to drop that perfect ten second fill effortlessly. The engineer had to invest thousands of dollars and a similar level of time to record it and make it sound amazing. And if some kid wants to use them, great, that should be allowed, but they gotta pay, because that music didn't just drop out of the sky. And if you want to sample a gigantic hit that everybody knows (which is going to make your derivative work much more marketable), then you're gonna have to pay a lot more, no? If I wanted, let's say, Jay-Z to come in and sing 99 problems on my song, what would that cost me? Probably a lot, and for good reason. If it's really worth nothing, then all these DJ's could either produce it or record it themselves. But it's not, and they can't. This is a classic economic externality. Writing, performing, and recording really good music costs a lot of money, and sampling is virtually free. Pay obscure artists a reasonable mechanical residual and negotiate with samples of huge hits for huge money.
- lkrubner 14y ago
  How much should they pay?
  - anigbrowl 14y ago
    Some percentage of their revenue proportional to the use of the copyrighted material. I don't mean that as a pat answer: that's the actual formula I'm proposing. Usually laws are written in dollar amounts for infringement which then affect the licensing fee charged. I think that assessing infringement or licensing on a percentage basis is much fairer, and that way artists who sample can do so without worrying about big licensing or legal fees, because they won't be liable until such time as they start seeing profits, at which point some fraction of those are shared with the other 'contributors.' This isn't a perfect system (I can think of many reasons against compulsory licensing, and the idea of price controls for copyright holders is also problematic), but at least it means that there's some linkage between clearance fees and actual economic benefit.
  - lazyBilly 14y ago
    Like I said, a small mechanical royalty for obscure songs where you don't know who owns what, or how to pay them. No copyright trolling. And for big songs, call it gold-record hits and above, whatever Jay-Z (or equivalent) demands. If you want to sample a big band's big hit, you are arguably getting the better of the arrangement, and they ought to have the right to charge you whatever the market will bear. Or tell you to shove it if they don't like the song they're getting shoved into.
gsabo 14y ago
Girl Talk is considered the poster child for musical sampling, but in my mind his output is uncontroversial because it's actually just DJing. No one ever sues a DJ for playing their track. These copyright issues only become interesting when you consider works which assert more transformative power on the samples.
swombat 14y ago
Cory Doctorow's "Pirate Cinema" is a great book to read on the topic. Very well written and engaging, too. Great story.
wazoox 14y ago
There are several chapters on this in Lessig's "Free Culture".

118 points by nthitz 14y ago

I love this series of analyses — they're always interesting and well-written. I'm not sure who at Priceonomics made the decision "Yes, let's spend time writing about interesting things", but I think it's great.

anigbrowl 14y ago
It's a great analysis, but I do take issue with some parts of the argumet: The result is a broken system that impairs the ability of young producers to make music without taking huge legal risks. Music based heavily on sampling others' work, for sure - sample clearance is an expensive nightmare and should be cheaper, perhaps compulsory, and more transparent and accessible. But you don't have to make music that way. You can sing and play a regular instrument, for example - and don't get started on the argument that there's nothing new under the sun, and that all basslines, drum rhythms etc. consist of ripping off someone else's idea. Musical quotation is widespread, but there is a huge different between coming up with your own riff that sounds a bit like your favorite band and just sampling the original. Furthermore, there's no special reason that sampling has to involve others' work. My main tool is a sampler but I hardly ever sample other people, and when i do it's usually a line from a movie or something, and done more for personal amusement. I would never, ever sample another musician's track and use it in my own music. It's not that it makes me morally superior, I just don't want to do that, because it would feel like I was just surfing on what they did because I couldn't come up with something cool on my own. I don't even care for using royalty-free sample loops of drum breaks or pead sounds for the same reason, although I will use one occasionally. What I do sample is going into the kitchen and making recordings of household implements as percussion, my cats' miaows, sounds in my neighborhood, or my own voice or snippets stuff I'm playing out of synthesizers. For me, it's a lot more fun to come up with my own drum beats or suchlike, sample those, and then start warping the audio to my heart's content. I'm not saying that this makes me a better musician or a better person than people who build records entirely out of samples - I'm not into Girl Talk but there are quite a few artists who work mainly with samples of others' stuff whose work I admire and enjoy. I'm just pointing out that that you can in fact go nuts with your sampler without ever having to deal with copyright clearance or infringement issues.
- vacri 14y ago
  Yeah, it's hardly a broken system just because you want to make money from the cool riffs that other people came up with, all without paying them a cent. If you're sampling someone else, then you're effectively making them a co-author of your material - and they should be due royalties for that, just like if you covered their song. How many mixes have we heard where the signature is the sample and the chaff is the stuff surrounding it? In any case, if the samples really were trivial and not worth kicking back money... then they wouldn't be sampled in the first place :)
  - anigbrowl 14y ago
    How many mixes have we heard where the signature is the sample and the chaff is the stuff surrounding it? That's a great point. One song the article mentioned that epitomized this was the Puff Daddy 'Missing you' song. The sentiment was worthwhile, and I can also see it within the musical tradition of rap and the soundsystem aesthetic where musicians develop their MCing skills by rapping over over a sampled loop in their bedroom/the garage etc. so to build a whole song over a single looped sample with a minimum of additional production elements actually served a musical function of evoking nostalgia for 'the way things used to be' when the people in question were young and just learning how to rap. But it ended up sounding like a complete lift of someone else's song, and while the licensing was probably taken care of in this case it's spawned thousands of imitations with even less musical novelty.
steveklabnik 14y ago
If you enjoy this kind of thing, I'd suggest longform.org and gwern.net.
- peter_l_downs 14y ago
  Already reading longform; just checked out gwern and it looks great. Thanks for the recommendation!

joezydeco 14y ago

If you want to go farther down the rabbit hole, this is an excellent 20-minute video about the history of the Amen Break, the "six-second clip that spawned several entire subcultures" and the rise of sampling: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5SaFTm2bcac http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5SaFTm2bcac

gfody 14y ago
fascinating video - curious I searched for Amen Break on whosampled.com and it returned a list of 789 tracks: http://www.whosampled.com/sampled/The%20Winstons/ http://www.whosampled.com/sampled/The%20Winstons/
- meatsock 14y ago
  i estimate that number to be off by tenfold or more

deleted 14y ago

[deleted]

masonhensley 14y ago

Girl Talk and other DJ's, remixers, samplers, whatever you want to call them make their money from performances. I was kinda hoping the article talked more about that aspect of their business. Basically all their mix tapes are promotion for the live events. When I was a Junior/Senior (2009-2010) at Vanderbilt, I was VP of the programming board that arranged speakers, concerts, homecoming, comedians and other campus events and activities. We had Girl Talk come and while the price was not 6-figure crazy like what Acivii[1] charges these days, I was hit with sticker shock big time. [1] http://www.gq.com/entertainment/music/201304/avicii-tim-bergling-profile-gq-april-2013 http://www.gq.com/entertainment/music/201304/avicii-tim-berg...

_delirium 14y ago
It's also easier, at least in the U.S., to do more liberal sampling when live than on recordings, since you don't have to clear the samples individually. Most music venues have a blanket license for performance rights with the main rights organizations, which clears the rights for live use of just about anything: stuff like the venue playing a CD as background music during intermission, a band playing a cover song on stage, or a DJ playing tracks or remixing samples.
hello_newman 14y ago
"Basically all their mixtapes are promotion for the live events." I think that is a great model, personally. I want artists to not care about getting rich off of downloads. I think it's great when artists ranging from Deadmau5, Lil Wayne or Wiz Khalifa, release mixtapes for free. That seems to be the "artist" mentality, fuck getting paid; I'm doing this (making music) because I love doing this. It shows passion, commitment to their craft, and a true level of artistry. You could even argue the same thing for developers who release their apps for free because they want everyone to enjoy it regardless of price. I obviously want artists to make as much money as possible, so releasing great mixtapes does make me, personally, want to go see their concerts. It seems to be a great way to market yourself and with labels taking so much from artists anyway, the place where most new artists make money is touring and live shows. I don't want to go to a concert wear essentially the artist is just playing their latest CD to a crowd of people.

deleted 14y ago

[deleted]

rlu 14y ago

Ah, funny coming to HN and clicking and then reading this article while listening to Super Mash Bros's 20 minute "Pure Fix Mix"[1]. Anyways, only half way done with the article but quite good so far. 1: https://soundcloud.com/super-mash-bros/pure-fix-mix https://soundcloud.com/super-mash-bros/pure-fix-mix

lifeisstillgood 14y ago

I'm a little old fashioned here - but sampling is about as simple copyright breach as you get - its cut and paste. However, if I were a record company and the top google search for a day was a skinny kid who has audiences full of screaming target demographics, no amount of cocaine on prostitutes would be too great till I had him signed in a contract Fautus would consider a bit on the restrictive side. Mumbling about how unfair it is to not be able to copy other people's work without paying them is a bit disingenuous, but if I owned those copyrights then this guy is a great way to get more out of the back catalog.

nthitz 14y ago
> In the UK, one producer sued the dance group MIAIRIRIS for sampling his work. Although the song was a top ten hit, he had no idea it sampled his song until a member of MIAIRIRIS mentioned it on the radio. It had been manipulated beyond recognition. I don't think it's always a simple cut and paste. The article mentions Puff Daddy's "I'll Be Missing You" sampling the Police, or The Beastie Boys sampling Led Zeppelin or the Beatles. You might listen to some of these songs and have no idea about the original. One time I was at a party and Kanye's 'Harder Better Faster Stronger' came on. I remember saying "I didn't know Kanye sampled Daft Punk" and someone replying something along the lines of "nah this is all original Kanye"
- 286c8cb04bda 14y ago
  > the dance group MIAIRIRIS That's not 'I', it's '|' -- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MARRS http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MARRS
  - nthitz 14y ago
    Oh thanks! I just c+p'ed from the article, goes to show you, it's just not that simple! :)
- lifeisstillgood 14y ago
  I was trying to emphasise that there is a qualitative difference between copying by children in bedrooms and copying by professionals or wannabe professionals. Alter copyright law is probably never going to happen in time, but market driven compromises will fix a lot of things

mikecane 14y ago

Keep in mind while reading this the takedowns of YouTube videos that just happened to have music playing in the background incidentally to the subject (Baby doing something cute, Mom grabs cellphone while radio is playing a song in the background in her otherwise real life, and begins taking a video of the kid).

joshontheweb 14y ago

We're hoping to address this issue at Soundkeep. Copyright reform is definitely needed, but creative commons is a great work-around. http://alpha.soundkeep.com http://alpha.soundkeep.com Beta coming soon!

lazyBilly 14y ago

I think you gotta pay the original artist. As an old-school analog musician, I had to sweat for literally decades to be able to drop that perfect ten second fill effortlessly. The engineer had to invest thousands of dollars and a similar level of time to record it and make it sound amazing. And if some kid wants to use them, great, that should be allowed, but they gotta pay, because that music didn't just drop out of the sky. And if you want to sample a gigantic hit that everybody knows (which is going to make your derivative work much more marketable), then you're gonna have to pay a lot more, no? If I wanted, let's say, Jay-Z to come in and sing 99 problems on my song, what would that cost me? Probably a lot, and for good reason. If it's really worth nothing, then all these DJ's could either produce it or record it themselves. But it's not, and they can't. This is a classic economic externality. Writing, performing, and recording really good music costs a lot of money, and sampling is virtually free. Pay obscure artists a reasonable mechanical residual and negotiate with samples of huge hits for huge money.

lkrubner 14y ago
How much should they pay?
- anigbrowl 14y ago
  Some percentage of their revenue proportional to the use of the copyrighted material. I don't mean that as a pat answer: that's the actual formula I'm proposing. Usually laws are written in dollar amounts for infringement which then affect the licensing fee charged. I think that assessing infringement or licensing on a percentage basis is much fairer, and that way artists who sample can do so without worrying about big licensing or legal fees, because they won't be liable until such time as they start seeing profits, at which point some fraction of those are shared with the other 'contributors.' This isn't a perfect system (I can think of many reasons against compulsory licensing, and the idea of price controls for copyright holders is also problematic), but at least it means that there's some linkage between clearance fees and actual economic benefit.
- lazyBilly 14y ago
  Like I said, a small mechanical royalty for obscure songs where you don't know who owns what, or how to pay them. No copyright trolling. And for big songs, call it gold-record hits and above, whatever Jay-Z (or equivalent) demands. If you want to sample a big band's big hit, you are arguably getting the better of the arrangement, and they ought to have the right to charge you whatever the market will bear. Or tell you to shove it if they don't like the song they're getting shoved into.

gsabo 14y ago

Girl Talk is considered the poster child for musical sampling, but in my mind his output is uncontroversial because it's actually just DJing. No one ever sues a DJ for playing their track. These copyright issues only become interesting when you consider works which assert more transformative power on the samples.

swombat 14y ago

Cory Doctorow's "Pirate Cinema" is a great book to read on the topic. Very well written and engaging, too. Great story.

wazoox 14y ago

There are several chapters on this in Lessig's "Free Culture".