Welcome back to my blog! I hope you’re having a lovely week. It’s been a busy week for me, but I found time to spend with my best friend last night. We got talking about music and we wondered:
Can sampled songs be counted as original or is it just copying someone else’s work to get exposure?
This question intrigued me and I wanted to look into it more today to see what other people thought about the issue.
http://alpientertainment.com/en/service/dj-performansi/
If you’ve never heard of sampling, music sampling is taking little pieces of songs and then rearranging/repeating them in a new song to make something new and unique.
So many songs you listen to every day may have sampling in them. Some examples include:
- “Rockstar” by Post Malone,
- “Shape of You” by Ed Sheeran
- “Crazy in Love” by Beyoncé
- “One Dance” by Drake
- “Uptown Funk” by Bruno Mars
- “Poker Face” by Lady Gaga (find my post about Gaga here)
- “Somebody That I Used to Know” by Gotye
You can find which songs were sampled as well as more examples here.
A legendary pioneer of sampling says yay!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4WkUrQQoz9E
On the team for sampling as a worthy form of original art, we have Hank Shocklee. Shocklee is one of the founders and is even a producer of a hip-hop group called Public Enemy. He is also currently the president of his own media company, Shocklee Entertainment.
In an interview with National Public Radio, Shocklee says,
“I think it’s just an art form…the original copyrights were there to protect the entire embodiment of the recording itself, you know, not necessarily the little pieces that was coming from it…the copyright laws have to now become updated to deal with the new landscape that we have” (National Public Radio).
What I think:
I feel like this narrative has been repeated over and over in the music industry (and other industries even). Technology is changing constantly and laws have to change along with it in order to meet the new needs they fulfill.
So I definitely agree with the fact that sampling is a whole new form of music itself. However, credit should still be due for the creator. Maybe the copyright laws should update to make sampling music more flexible so someone isn’t getting sued just for having a similar sounding track as someone else. Someone shouldn’t be able to recreate a whole song and then be allowed to call it their own work, though. Even when people do covers of songs, they give credit.
Maybe there should be a time limit that people are allowed to take from another song to sample? What do you think? Make sure to leave me a comment of your thoughts.
Until Next Time,
Vic Wilbur
