In early February production duo Flosstradamus—Josh “J2K” Young, who lives in Chicago, and Curt “Autobot” Cameruci, who’s left for Brooklyn—finished mixing a song called “Total Recall.” After spending the better part of a decade building a reputation in the international dance-music scene as DJs and remixers, they’d decided to focus on their own compositions—in November they’d released their first EP of original material, Jubilation, on the Fool’s Gold label. (Jubilation 2.0 came out this week.)
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Jeffree’s tends to post a new release for free every week or two (usually a single or an EP), and occasionally rounds them up and sells the resulting collection of MP3s, encoded at a higher bit rate for improved fidelity. Only a couple of the label’s releases have used samples, and they’ve been taken out of consideration for the for-pay collections. This policy was developed, according to Devro, as a preemptive defense against lawsuits by copyright holders. If a label isn’t charging for a song containing a sample, the thinking goes, how could the song damage the value of the original copyright? And who would bother going after people for samples they’re not even trying to make money from?
EDM and rap artists have experimented much more thoroughly with releasing music for free online than their peers in other styles. The genres have shared roots in sampling, remixing, and otherwise playing around with preexisting recordings—and because getting a sample cleared (which costs around $5,000 on average these days) is beyond most musicians’ budgets, EDM and rap also share a history of doing their playing around without permission from rights holders. In the days of physical media, copyright scofflaws had to release music surreptitiously, like bootleggers, to avoid being hunted down and sued. But now that the absence of manufacturing expenses makes it practical to distribute derivative works online for free, unauthorized samplers and remixers have begun to maintain (like Jeffree’s) that they’re in the clear because they’re not diverting consumers’ money from the original release. File lockers and sites like SoundCloud overflow with illicit remixes and mix tapes full of uncleared samples.
Though Mensch says there’s a “movement” to reform sampling laws and remove the obstacles to getting samples cleared, she admits that it’s too small to be very influential. But she respects hip-hop and dance music, and she’s seen the damage the current system can do. She once represented a rap group that lost a clearance suit and ended up owing 50 percent of their royalties to each of three sample owners—for every record they sold, they had to pay out 150 percent of what they made. Mensch hopes that fans of rap and EDM can turn sampling reform into a political issue.
