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.
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 :)
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.
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.