MOTUnation.com

MIDI Life Crisis wrote:

jgest wrote:...coffee and 420 on me if ever we meet!

Dang!

you too, cause while we may be ages apart, I appreciate and respect your wit, knowledge base and obvious experience and participation in an industry that I can only fantasize about being a real player in.......

jgest wrote:

MIDI Life Crisis wrote:

jgest wrote:...coffee and 420 on me if ever we meet!

Dang!

you too, cause while we may be ages apart, I appreciate and respect your wit, knowledge base and obvious experience and participation in an industry that I can only fantasize about being a real player in.......

HA! Fact is, friend, we're all players. It is really a matter of simply sticking to your guns and being willing to fail in the effort. The one "truism" in show business that I have found is ALWAYS right is this: those who succeed are the ones who don't give up.

But I'll bring the papers.

MIDI Life Crisis wrote:

jgest wrote:

MIDI Life Crisis wrote: Dang!

you too, cause while we may be ages apart, I appreciate and respect your wit, knowledge base and obvious experience and participation in an industry that I can only fantasize about being a real player in.......

HA! Fact is, friend, we're all players. It is really a matter of simply sticking to your guns and being willing to fail in the effort. The one "truism" in show business that I have found is ALWAYS right is this: those who succeed are the ones who don't give up.

But I'll bring the papers.

may your day be blessed along with an upcoming sincere seasons greeting's and holiday cheer .....

jgest wrote: may your day be blessed along with an upcoming sincere seasons greeting's and holiday cheer .....

Thanks - But first - Thanksgiving food fest!

MIDI Life Crisis wrote:

jgest wrote: may your day be blessed along with an upcoming sincere seasons greeting's and holiday cheer .....

Thanks - But first - Thanksgiving food fest!

I lumped it all together.

Just to get back on topic somewhat I'll just repeat my feelings. I've never actually tried to release something that contains samples from commercial CDs, but enjoy seeing what I can come up with in my spare time for fun. I think the combinations that can result from sampled collage compositions are genuine creative expressions, and there's a long standing tradition of collage in other art forms that never had to enter into this sort of discussion.

I do think the law needs to be changed to allow for these types of works. I'll repeat that I'm against something like "Ice Ice Baby" or "Bittersweet Symphony" where basically a whole, recognizable musical idea was taken without credit, and presented basically unchanged. That, I agree, is immoral. However, sampling very brief...under 2 seconds I'd say...sections of material form an existing source should be fair use, and the idea of it being "recognizable" should also come into play. I'm also very much for the citing of "sources" in this regard. If there were legislation in place that mandated all samples be under a specified length of time, with credit given along with the release...that would be something I would definitely support...because I repeat that this isn't stealing "the work" -- "the music" is much more than tiny pieces of a recording, it's the entirety of it, and there's no damage to the orignal author, if anything, they have more to gain with the added promotion...as long as the credit is there.

Actually, here's something interesting from an article from 2004...I'm not sure where the issue stands as of today, however...

"The brief, which asks the 6th Circuit to reconsider the issue en banc, warns of a torrent of lawsuits: "For more than a decade, the music industry has conformed its conduct to the existing rules-obtaining licenses for sampling when appropriate, and relying on de minimus and fair use principles if and where they apply. The panel's abrupt and dramatic change in the law ... creates retroactive liability for anyone who may have properly relied on the previously existing rules.

While the industry may have long assumed that minor or "de minimus" sampling was acceptable, it is debatable whether there were any "previously existing rules" to that effect. What is clear is that de minimus borrowing does not violate the copyright to an underlying song. But it has been an open question whether the same is true of sound recording copyrights, according to Kohn.

Kohn said that record companies have probably been reluctant to litigate the issue because they realize that their own artists make extensive use of sampling."

http://www.law.com/jsp/article.jsp?id=1096473910640

Continued...

...apparently, this company is a single person...the company's sole objective? Buy up music copyrights for the sole purpose of extorting money from those who make use of their copywrited music through sampling, no matter how small.

http://www.slate.com/id/2153961/

"George Clinton is otherwise known as the King of Interplanetary Funk and, along with the late Rick James, the world's most famous funk musician. In the 1970s, Boladian and Bridgeport managed to seize most of the copyrights to Clinton's songs. How exactly they did so is highly disputed. However, in at least a few cases, Boladian assigned the copyrights to Bridgeport by writing a contract and then faking Clinton's signature. As Clinton put it in this interview, "he just stole 'em."

Bridgeport, if a thief, stole the winning ticket. The Clinton sounds it acquired went on to be among the most widely sampled in the rap music of the 1980s and 1990s. Sampling is as elemental to the genre as beats, beefs, or bragging, and Clinton's sonic creations were a major part of Public Enemy's debut, and were also used heavily by N.W.A., Dr. Dre, Biggie Smalls, and other rap pioneers. Often the sampling is virtually impossible to detect"

Mr. Quimper wrote:Continued...

...apparently, this company is a single person...the company's sole objective? Buy up music copyrights for the sole purpose of extorting money from those who make use of their copywrited music through sampling, no matter how small.

Heck, he can buy a percentage of any of mine he wants to! Starting bid is about $500k for non-published songs of no longer than 2 minutes. Only publishing rights will be transferred.

A friend of mine used to be the publishing agent for the Doobie Brothers. He said there was a fortune in it.

Shooshie wrote:publishing... there was a fortune in it.

Oh, but for how long?

People want to put that market to bed. Some musicians want to put that market to bed.

Here is your gun. There is your foot. Enjoy!

chrispick wrote:

Shooshie wrote:publishing... there was a fortune in it.

Oh, but for how long?

People want to put that market to bed. Some musicians want to put that market to bed.

Here is your gun. There is your foot. Enjoy!

That's what I wondered. If there was a fortune in being the Doobie Brothers agent, why did he quit and join the agency I was in? Except that he was sucking up all his profits through a rolled up dollar bill. That may have had something to do with his decision to leave. This was in the days before sampled music. He quit the DB in 1985, and came to work at the agency I was at. He'd been their publishing agent since the beginning.

But why is it a bad market? That's where most songwriters make their money -- selling to movies, commercials, and dealing with the thousands of cover-tunes by bands around the world. Someone's got to keep track of all that, and if you don't have your own guy doing it, you're dependent upon ASCAAP or BMI or whomever.

Shooshie

Clarification of a self-confessed fuddy-duddy's position on sampling:

Whilst I've had to live without a sampler for 10 years, it's something I didn't think I could ever do.
I love the juxtapositional stuff (Trance context, mainly) jgest mentions.
I used to take a TCD-D7 DAT everywhere for collecting stuff.
I even spent months sampling keyboards and synths with that thing in stores and wherever I could.
Simply a case of being without one.

As far as loops are concerned, and my "understanding" is that we're talking recorded performances here, I'm as fuddy as the duddiest of duds. I mean, dudes.

Has anyone heard Girl Talk yet? What he's doing with Ableton Live in a live setting is insanely creative in the pop-art-nostalgia-dance-party kind of way. Also, look at Paul's Boutique, Beck's Odeley... amazing records that relied heavily on "right-under-your-nose" sampling in a very creative way.

If you are putting out a record for sale and use sampling I 100% believe that the artists that you are sampling from should be paid either through a licensing fee or royalties. I'm not sure what kind of copyright structure is in place for this, but if you put out a record and use an 8-bar loop or something then as far as I'm concerned it's almost a remix at that point. Give credit where credit is due. I'm all about the playing field being wide-open. It should promote commerce as well as creativity. However, if the copyright holder doesn't want to license their work for whatever reason, well, it should be respected.

However, if you sample a snare drum hit or something under, say, 2 seconds, well, I'm not sure if there needs to be a licensing fee for that or if it ends up being copyright infringement. In all reality it's like copyrighting a word from a novel, or a word from a conversation, etc. It's not like everyone is going to be like "damn, that's the snare from Duran Duran's Rio!!!" or anything. And no a snare hit is not the same as a drum break.

Obviously I'm into more creative uses of manipulated samples.

Jeff

even Jazz has roots in this idea...using existing material as a springboard for creativity.

WHAT!!!!:shock:

What Jazz are you talking about? Let me educate you: Coltarine, The Duke, Porter, Gillespi, Vaughn, Ellington, and all the great movers and shakers of Jazz only rehearsed to basically grasp the concept of the song so that they would have a map sort to speak to go by and secondly most of these artist were improvisations, meaning they made up what they were playing as they were playing it no rehearsals and more than likely they never or probably couldn't play it the same thing the same way twice. Aaaand..... Most people who sample do it because they simply do not have the ability to write their own musical compositions. So they borrow a piece of something thats close to what they see in their own music and embellish that. Old School rappers like Spoonie G, Scott La Rock, and RUN DMC used vinyl samples because they couldn't afford synths and drum machines, remember these guys grew up in the hood. If you do a little research you will see that the old school hip hop artist eventually started composing their own music after they started making money with the exception of a few.