De La Soul are known for the effect their use of samples had on their music sales and availability on streaming sites. They’re finally streaming. Why now?
This year has already been bittersweet for fans of pioneering hip-hop group, De La Soul. There was the recent death of group member David Jolicoeur, aka Trugoy, which came on the heels of the announcement that the group’s first six albums would finally be available on streaming platforms.
So why the decades-long wait? The answer is sampling. Their 1989 debut album, 3 Feet High and Rising, for example, used more than seventy samples. And while they were cleared for LPs and cassettes (well, mostly, but we’ll get to that), no one saw the streaming age coming.
Once the whole age of digital music came into play, new deals needed to be cut for those entire albums,” De La Soul’s Kelvin Mercer, aka Posdnuos, told the BBC. And the record company didn’t want to deal with it, he continued. “They’re like, ‘Is it worth it?’ They’ve got to go through almost every song with a fine comb to make sure this sample or that sample was cleared.”
While sampling is one of the big legal hurdles musicians often have to clear, it’s not the only one. And some of those hurdles are so high, placed so perfectly, that sailing over them (or crashing into them, as the case may be) changes the whole race. As lawyer and journalist Victor Li writes, “Occasionally, a band or artist will be involved in a lawsuit so groundbreaking and important that it will set a precedent.”
Sample clearing was an issue from the beginning for De La Soul. Their song, “Transmitting Live From Mars” used twelve seconds from a Turtles song, which, as ethnomusicologist Wayne Marshall explains, ended “in a $1.7 million settlement in 1989,” and “sent a chill through the hip-hop world and a buzz through the business world.”
A whole new economy was created following the suit. “Publishing companies…have instigated hundreds of suits against hip-hop labels, many of them retroactive,” Marshall writes. As Li explains, “Now, there are companies whose main purpose is to obtain copyright clearance for samples.”
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