Sampling is becoming harder to do, says DJ Shadow

By Andy Malt | Published on Thursday 25 May 2017

DJ Shadow is an artist who built a career by masterfully using samples of other work to create new pieces of music. However, he says that increased litigiousness and greed have now forced him to progressively move away from that manner of working.

“I’ve always believed in clearing samples, however I believe it needs to be done on a musicologist basis”, he tells The Guardian. Which is to say, each sample should be valued “based on the space that it occupies and the number of seconds that it plays over the course of the track, in relation to other elements that come and go”. Using that approach, you can then say, for example, “this sample is worth 16.7% of the composition”.

“Now, if that could be done, then I would clear everything”, he says. “But the problem is, you go to the first person – they want 75%, whether they deserve it or not. You go to the next person they want 70% – whoops – you can’t cut a pie that many times, there isn’t enough pie to go around”.

“In a strange sense I feel like music has never been worth less as a commodity, and yet sampling has never been more risky”, he concludes. “We work in a hyper-capitalist time, where you grab what you can, get everything you can, doesn’t matter whether it’s right or wrong, it doesn’t matter whether it’s valid, it doesn’t matter whether it’s deserved”.

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