Abstract
This article argues for a view of popular music production that better accounts for sampling than has historically been the case by viewing it as a continuum of activity. Weighing evidence from interviews with musical practitioners against the legal and industry frameworks, we illustrate, first, how sampling has been legally differentiated from other types of musical copying. Secondly we show that, despite this, comparable ethical codes exist within and across musical methods wherein sampling is part of the spectrum of activities. Thirdly, we discuss the ubiquity of digital technology within popular music production and the resultant closer relationship between sampling and other musical techniques moving onto, fourthly, how the sampling aesthetic has become integrated into musical practice in a manner insufficiently accounted for by its legal and industrial contexts. This ‘post-sampling’ reality places sampling and other musical techniques along a spectrum, in practical and ethical terms, and musicians would be better served by sampling being treated as part of the overall musical palette, allowing both scholars and the law to concentrate on ideologies of practice across the tools that musicians use rather than between different specific techniques.
Highlights
This article draws on research examining the ethics and politics of musical copying, copyright and digitalization
Whilst referencing the wider literature to discuss digital sampling in the context of other kinds of musical copying, our main focus is on what musicians do, how their creative process is inflected by sampling technology, and the aesthetic, ethical and legal implications of this
Our purpose has been to illustrate, by way of their own experiences and words, how musicians have come to operate in a realm characterised by an ever more integrated relationship between sampling and other musical practices
Summary
This article draws on research examining the ethics and politics of musical copying, copyright and digitalization. It involved interviews with musicians, managers and producers at different stages of their careers and including practitioners across various genres within ‘popular music’ as it may be broadly understood, covering different levels of commercial operation, from session players and backroom writers to featured artists. Our goal was to centralise musicians and their direct collaborators in business and creative practice within the narrative of copying. Their voices provide important empirical evidence for an assessment of the field that works from creative practice to its intersection with legal and industrial contexts. Centralising musicians, reveals the ethical alignments of musical practice across the techniques that include various forms of sampling amongst an array of options
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