you showed me
huh, never would have guessed that was a Turtles sample. nice.
iunno when that lawsuit was decided by the courts (the De La album was released in '89) but the precedent-setting case was in '91 between the labels representing Biz Markie and Gilbert O’sullivan concerning a more-or-less throw-away album filler song of Biz comedically remaking “Alone again (naturally)”.
no, the law will always side with the precedent, but nowadays a lot of rap (and everything else) is not released by a label, people just put it on the internet, and whom to sue may not be known, so I believe that a lot of stuff goes unprosecuted. but nobody hears most of that stuff and it doesn’t make any money anyway. however, the rights-holding label will at least look into any infringement they find.
anything released by a label will have samples cleared prior to release, which comes out of the budget they offered to the artist in their deal. which means artists have moved away from sampling because they’d rather their producer make tracks with drum machines and synths than pay extra for clearance. you have to be Jay-Z or the like, with a guaranteed millions of sales, for samples to be profitable. I read the figure at the time for the clearance of the Annie sample for “Hard Knock Life,” I can’t remember what it was, but it was fucking astronomical. but it was the lead single on a hotly-anticipated album by a superstar artist: everyone was going to make money so the sample was cleared.
the effect as a whole was that it changed hip hop (for the worse, imo) since the creativity of sonic collage was beaten-down (even further than the standard label meddling) into a figure on a bottom line. the multiple-samples-per-song music of, say, Public Enemy or famously sample-dense Paul’s Boutique (which was released i think within a year before the landmark case) was gradually replaced with non-sample beats by Neptunes (i.e. Pharrell) or Swizz Beats (Ruff Ryder’s producer i.e. DMX) and on into the trap rap era. in other words, the kids brought up on Neptunes et al don’t think there’s anything wrong with rap without samples; however it was the very foundation of the music: hip hop started as a dj culture of playing breaks (dj Kool Herc) then of looping those breaks (dj Grandmaster Flash) and digital sampling was just a studio convenience. rapping, while a cornerstone of the music, came after the collage of breaks had defined hip hop, and the rappers were initially second-billed to the dj.
ok, I’ll shut up now except to say that as for enya and whatever music the OP is about I don’t think falls under the nomenclature of “sampling” as it is generally known, but maybe something like musiq concrete(?)
i suppose the difference lies in if the composer cut the tape in precisely the correct places on the notes or measures that he pre-selected versus just randomly cutting the cassette tape and then seeing what sounds could be made by juxtaposing the random sounds. the phrasing suggests the latter, which (for lack of knowledge into those music scenes) I believe falls under musiq concrete but iunno.
edit: @anon61221983 I think I missed your point. philosophically, I’m with the composer, but if I was his lawyer, I don’t think we could mount a defense. the courts don’t give a shit about anything other than “is there any length of copyrighted material on the release in question?” if so, it’s illegal unless it had been licensed by the rights-holder.
