Hip-hop is by far the utmost popular music genre of today’s generation. Artists such as Post Malone, Drake, and 21 Savage dominate the Billboard Hot 100. Hip-hop, as a music genre, is at its peak. One of the special aspects of Hip-hop is how true the music genre has stayed with its roots. Using a series of techniques and tools, Hip-hop has always been rooted in black culture, this is true even as Hip-hop evolved over time. One additional, powerful tool that retained that black identity completely was the use of sampling in a song. Sampling is the act of taking a portion, of one sound recording and reusing it as an instrument or a sound recording in a different song. Sampling has been used in Hip-hop to reference older music genres etched into
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For instance, take 3 Feet High and Rising. The album consists of seventy-three total samples. Let’s take about a third of those samples and assume they are more than three seconds long and estimate an average license cost of $10,000 each. The other two-thirds will be samples that are less than three seconds, and cost an average of $3,000. This works out to an estimated total of $386,000 for the licensing alone. Remember that this estimate excludes royalties and other costs of producing the album. However, even though the cost of sampling is ludicrous, De La Soul payed 1.7 million dollars out of court for one uncleared sample. This goes to show that not clearing samples will costs an artist more in the long …show more content…
These fees created a rift in the music production industry; those who couldn’t afford samples and those who could. For a certain amount of time, only those who could afford samples thrived. When these laws on sampling were put into place, artists used samples in a variety of ways, in some respects, it was the backbone of their music. When artists can no longer use these samples, making a beat becomes challenging. At the time, technology was limited in Hip-hop production. Computers had not advanced to a level to have real time audio editing, so specialized pieces of equipment were used for audio editing such as the Roland TR-808 or the Roland XP-80. Of course, these machines were expensive on their own, Yet, having a sampler opened a lot of possibilities for poor artists. They might not be able to afford the equipment, but by sampling an artist who used more expensive equipment, they could seemingly emulate this equipment in their own songs. Nevertheless, poor artist could not afford these sampling fees, so they either did not release their music, or took the risk and release music with uncleared
For instance, take 3 Feet High and Rising. The album consists of seventy-three total samples. Let’s take about a third of those samples and assume they are more than three seconds long and estimate an average license cost of $10,000 each. The other two-thirds will be samples that are less than three seconds, and cost an average of $3,000. This works out to an estimated total of $386,000 for the licensing alone. Remember that this estimate excludes royalties and other costs of producing the album. However, even though the cost of sampling is ludicrous, De La Soul payed 1.7 million dollars out of court for one uncleared sample. This goes to show that not clearing samples will costs an artist more in the long …show more content…
These fees created a rift in the music production industry; those who couldn’t afford samples and those who could. For a certain amount of time, only those who could afford samples thrived. When these laws on sampling were put into place, artists used samples in a variety of ways, in some respects, it was the backbone of their music. When artists can no longer use these samples, making a beat becomes challenging. At the time, technology was limited in Hip-hop production. Computers had not advanced to a level to have real time audio editing, so specialized pieces of equipment were used for audio editing such as the Roland TR-808 or the Roland XP-80. Of course, these machines were expensive on their own, Yet, having a sampler opened a lot of possibilities for poor artists. They might not be able to afford the equipment, but by sampling an artist who used more expensive equipment, they could seemingly emulate this equipment in their own songs. Nevertheless, poor artist could not afford these sampling fees, so they either did not release their music, or took the risk and release music with uncleared