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For years now EDM and rap artists have given music away for free online, under the unexamined assumption that not charging for it would allow them to explore sampling and remixing in ways that would be amazingly difficult, if not downright impossible, to pull off within the label system, where all those samples would have to be cleared and paid for. But it turns out that giving away derivative works—the legal category into which songs using sampled source material fall—isn’t any different from charging for them in the eyes of the law. In this week’s B Side feature, I talk about how local dance-rap hybridists Flosstradamus ran into a little trouble with a free song that lifted a melody from EDM producer Dutch Master—now that sampling artists and those being sampled are starting to realize the legal facts, the copyright free-for-all online might be over.
