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You're not a little old fashioned; you seem to have missed the last 25 years of musical development. Go look up Soundcloud and see that most likely a third of

You're not a little old fashioned; you seem to have missed the last 25 years of musical development. Go look up Soundcloud and see that most likely a third of the tracks being uploaded are remixes and edits of existing tracks, all of them innovative in their own ways. There are entire genres of electronic music that exist due to sampling. Dub, Drum n' Bass, Electro, Latin American EDM, electronic Balkan, way too many to mention here. There are literally millions of hours of recorded music; its market and creative value are far, far lower than what the big recording groups claim on the simple basis of the volume of production out there. Ironically, I have never heard of any of the (tens of thousands of) independent labels bitching about people remixing their tracks or uploading edits or playing them at gigs. You sound like a person that purchases his or her music and listens to it mostly from radio or commercial sources. That's less than 1% of all published music, and its a world of great much depth and complexity where copying samples the a social norm. That copyright law in the last twenty years has favored the large, visible majority has little effect on the ethical implications for the rest of the artists. And seriously, if a sample is so egreriously illegal as you claim, then I hope that in your world half of all rock music, R&B, and the entirety of blues be declared illegal, since the song structure and chord progressions are in general less creative than the spins electronic produces make on their samples.

anigbrowl 14y ago
I'm an electronic musician whose entire setup is oriented around my sampler, and I wholly agree with him. Don't project all your frustrations with the existing music industry onto his comment, you're blaming him for things he never actually said.
- Daishiman 14y ago
  Then as an electronic musician you know very well that 90% of the current acts in dance music scenes would never be capable of clearing an album because of the overhead in licensing. Really, I see nothing particularly special in a 4 or even 40-second section of music to warrant an unusually high level of protection. Most samples are completely unrecognizable, and when present and recognizable they are honestly a minimal fraction of the creative output in a song. And really, what makes samples so special over riffs, or even FX? The fact that you agree with him doesn't change the fact that current situation is a historical anomaly that greatly limits the publication of creative content, and that the negotiation rates are basically a form of economic oppression as they stand.
  - rdouble 14y ago
    Most samples are completely unrecognizable, and when present and recognizable they are honestly a minimal fraction of the creative output in a song. Top charting hip hop tracks have used samples of other songs as the entire basis of the song, for two decades.
    - Daishiman 14y ago
      And how many of those samples were known before the artist in question put them to use? You should listen to the originals sometime and realize that a lot of those tracks are crap, or boring, and their only redeeming value lies in the looping of a tiny section which was not even selected by the author, hence it can be easily argued that the person who sampled has as much or more creative input than the original sampled track. Yet you can sample any set of household sounds or recordings and that doesn't mean that those sounds have much of a redeeming artistic value. Track selection in itself is an art form which makes many genres of music actually listenable; no one ever plays House or Breakbeat songs back-to-back without the expectation of them being played in full. So do DJs get 50% of their earnings taken away by the producers? Do they get denied the right to play tracks because that's taking away control from songs? Skilled DJs make songs come alive and have a creative value that may surpass that of the original producers, and I have yet to find anyone who would feel that anyone's rights are being violated for that. I may agree with limitations where the artist might be defamed by the playing of the music (in the case of "Born in the USA" being played in political conventions), but really, when you release a song the ethical expectation that the artist still has full control of the original work in impractical and I have yet to see anyone who claims that, actually be consistent with their thinking. On the question of sampling, I love Aphex Twin, especially this song, "Avril 14th" http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MBFXJw7n-fU http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MBFXJw7n-fU . Kanye West's "Blame Game" samples it and it accounts for 80% of the melody. But it's an entirely, completely different song; the sample selection is different, tempo was altered, extra sounds were added, a lyrical component was added. It's a different song, and while it might be reasonable that a small portion of profits from the sale of the song might be attributable to the use of the sample, it is an order of magnitude or two below what content industries demand, which is ridiculous and a form of cultural oppression. This argument is further strengthened when, again, there are millions of songs that can be sampled and can be purposely mangled to not resemble the original. And really, the argument is about as valid as the author of the Amen break going after the entirety of the UK Bass scene, or Roland going after a third of all music ever made in the last 20 years because everyone uses the 808 drum kit without licensed samples. Culture is built on its own past and until 50 years ago its sharing was permitted freely, even if the extent of copying the mediums allowed was more limited. In the past 4 years electronic music has evolved more than in the past decade, more people are listening and becoming involved in music than ever before, and more culture can be absorbed today by anyone than ever before, and becoming an artist is easier today than at any other point in history. I see no redeeming value in the preservation of an antiquated business model which supports a very small minority, whose role in the determination of culture becomes ever more diluted every passing day. If you ask me, our obligation towards cultural heritage is subtantially stronger than the maintenance of a market built on an artificial monopoly that was never even considered to be in the interests of society at large (because, as you know, most of the copyright legislation was written by lobbyists representing the largest media conglomerates).
vidarh 14y ago
25 years? I think you're being too kind. While being able to physically reproduce the exact sound is reasonably new, there are large numbers of examples from classical music that are explicitly and on purpose borrowing themes from other composers and altering them. E.g. Bach's Canonic variations on "Vom Himmel hoch da komm'ich hier" from 1747 (based on a hymn written and composed by Martin Luther). "Theme and variation" is a formal technique in classical form, that while it does not require borrowing (the theme could very well be your own) has also been extensively used by classical composers to borrow other composers themes for at least 250 or so years and weave it into their own music.

anigbrowl 14y ago

I'm an electronic musician whose entire setup is oriented around my sampler, and I wholly agree with him. Don't project all your frustrations with the existing music industry onto his comment, you're blaming him for things he never actually said.

Daishiman 14y ago
Then as an electronic musician you know very well that 90% of the current acts in dance music scenes would never be capable of clearing an album because of the overhead in licensing. Really, I see nothing particularly special in a 4 or even 40-second section of music to warrant an unusually high level of protection. Most samples are completely unrecognizable, and when present and recognizable they are honestly a minimal fraction of the creative output in a song. And really, what makes samples so special over riffs, or even FX? The fact that you agree with him doesn't change the fact that current situation is a historical anomaly that greatly limits the publication of creative content, and that the negotiation rates are basically a form of economic oppression as they stand.
- rdouble 14y ago
  Most samples are completely unrecognizable, and when present and recognizable they are honestly a minimal fraction of the creative output in a song. Top charting hip hop tracks have used samples of other songs as the entire basis of the song, for two decades.
  - Daishiman 14y ago
    And how many of those samples were known before the artist in question put them to use? You should listen to the originals sometime and realize that a lot of those tracks are crap, or boring, and their only redeeming value lies in the looping of a tiny section which was not even selected by the author, hence it can be easily argued that the person who sampled has as much or more creative input than the original sampled track. Yet you can sample any set of household sounds or recordings and that doesn't mean that those sounds have much of a redeeming artistic value. Track selection in itself is an art form which makes many genres of music actually listenable; no one ever plays House or Breakbeat songs back-to-back without the expectation of them being played in full. So do DJs get 50% of their earnings taken away by the producers? Do they get denied the right to play tracks because that's taking away control from songs? Skilled DJs make songs come alive and have a creative value that may surpass that of the original producers, and I have yet to find anyone who would feel that anyone's rights are being violated for that. I may agree with limitations where the artist might be defamed by the playing of the music (in the case of "Born in the USA" being played in political conventions), but really, when you release a song the ethical expectation that the artist still has full control of the original work in impractical and I have yet to see anyone who claims that, actually be consistent with their thinking. On the question of sampling, I love Aphex Twin, especially this song, "Avril 14th" http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MBFXJw7n-fU http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MBFXJw7n-fU . Kanye West's "Blame Game" samples it and it accounts for 80% of the melody. But it's an entirely, completely different song; the sample selection is different, tempo was altered, extra sounds were added, a lyrical component was added. It's a different song, and while it might be reasonable that a small portion of profits from the sale of the song might be attributable to the use of the sample, it is an order of magnitude or two below what content industries demand, which is ridiculous and a form of cultural oppression. This argument is further strengthened when, again, there are millions of songs that can be sampled and can be purposely mangled to not resemble the original. And really, the argument is about as valid as the author of the Amen break going after the entirety of the UK Bass scene, or Roland going after a third of all music ever made in the last 20 years because everyone uses the 808 drum kit without licensed samples. Culture is built on its own past and until 50 years ago its sharing was permitted freely, even if the extent of copying the mediums allowed was more limited. In the past 4 years electronic music has evolved more than in the past decade, more people are listening and becoming involved in music than ever before, and more culture can be absorbed today by anyone than ever before, and becoming an artist is easier today than at any other point in history. I see no redeeming value in the preservation of an antiquated business model which supports a very small minority, whose role in the determination of culture becomes ever more diluted every passing day. If you ask me, our obligation towards cultural heritage is subtantially stronger than the maintenance of a market built on an artificial monopoly that was never even considered to be in the interests of society at large (because, as you know, most of the copyright legislation was written by lobbyists representing the largest media conglomerates).

vidarh 14y ago

25 years? I think you're being too kind. While being able to physically reproduce the exact sound is reasonably new, there are large numbers of examples from classical music that are explicitly and on purpose borrowing themes from other composers and altering them. E.g. Bach's Canonic variations on "Vom Himmel hoch da komm'ich hier" from 1747 (based on a hymn written and composed by Martin Luther). "Theme and variation" is a formal technique in classical form, that while it does not require borrowing (the theme could very well be your own) has also been extensively used by classical composers to borrow other composers themes for at least 250 or so years and weave it into their own music.