Samples, Remix's, Covers, Royalties

15 February 2008, 12:30 | ,

A friend of mine recently showed me this.

Uffie’s hit track “Pop the Glock” is really similar to an classic hip-hop song “Top Billin’” by Audio Two. And by similar, I mean like Weird-Al parody similar. Pop the Glock uses not only samples from Top Billin’, but lyrics and structure as well. Now, I still like both tracks, but it does raise some interesting questions.

I fully endorse sampling. Creatively using pieces from other tracks to make something new doesn’t bother me. Whether the artist takes one track to use or creates new songs from several tracks , I’m enjoying it. I also don’t think that in both cases, any royalty money should change hands either.

However, this is more of a cover of the song than anything else.

So when does royalty money need to be paid? I’ve tried to answer this question a bunch of times. How much of a song is too much? At what point is it no longer inspiration and just out right usage/theft?

I brought this up to a friend of mine , and he pointed out that in the proposed Canadian Copyright Act, looks to banish all Fair Use.

Now, you’re probably saying “But RYLAAND! It’s not that people can’t use samples, its that they have to PAY for them!” And I’m sure those royalties will be priced reasonably, so that your average joe-independent-artist can still use them. Wrong. What will happen is a royalty-gaurding frenzy. People will be looking to turn 10 cents off any song they can secure the rights to.

This is a long post that I don’t have an answer to. I don’t think laws that are flexible enough to say which songs have too much sampling in them exist, or even could exist. It’s so subjective. For now, I’ll use whatever sample I want, and make something new from it.

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