sampling + hip hop + on the media

WNYC's On The Media did a whole show (actually a rebroadcast) about the future of the music industry this week, one segment of which -- entitled "They Say I Stole This" -- focused-in on sampling. (Sampling parts of tunes, that is, as opposed to sampling an instrument for use in your midi setup.) You can download the podcast (from iTunes, etc) or read the transcript here. It's an interesting piece concerning copyright and fair use, and though a little thin it does provoke some thought.

I think everyone at heart would say that stealing music isn't a good thing (especially if you're a musician and you'd like to see some bread for the work you've done), but on the other hand if you're old enough to have ever made cassette tapes of your favorite songs it just doesn't seem like copying music digitally should be such a big deal, though the implications are a little different. And if copying whole tunes doesn't seem like such a big deal certainly copying little parts of them won't seem a big deal, either. In fact a decent artistic manifesto could easily be written concerning the merits of using only or primarily the detritus of all the music that has come to us from the past. And not only of famous tunes: there is so much recorded music that has come and gone (and not even digitized) -- and was at best only marginally popular -- that using it to create new music seems like a beautiful way of preserving it, and acknowledging that we are indebted to our past, all of the past.