Surely you know the Beatles’s White Album, and rapper Jay-Z did the Black Album. One enterprising producer (Brian Burton) mixed the two together, using creative sampling techniques. He came up with The Grey Album, which drew legal opposition from The Beatles. Imagine rap beats, riffs and lyrics with White Album instrumentals and vocal snippets in the background. This article provides the best survey of the debate I have seen so far.
The case for allowing such remixes?:
“…the law gives copyright owners too much control, in part because getting permission to sample an existing work is rarely as simple as one artist calling another and asking. They tend to peg the artists’ record labels as the bad guys and unsung musicians as the victims.
“Sampling is something that’s been sort of made illegal by the major labels over the last decade and a half,” says Nicholas Reville, co-founder of Downhill Battle, an independent-music advocacy group based in Worcester, Mass., that spearheaded efforts to distribute Burton’s work.
“It sounds hyperbolic, but they really have banned an art form from the mainstream. This wasn’t about getting whatever album for free just to defy the major labels, it was about making sure that they weren’t able to censor this work of art and about [demonstrating] why there needs to be a reasonable and practical sampling right.””
The best argument against such practices?:
“”A one-off, isolated thing like ‘The Grey Album,’ yeah, it’s interesting,” Carter says. “But I think we’re going to be getting a lot of it. You’re going to get ‘The Dark Side of the Moon’ album put together with this, ‘Sandinista’ with Bob Marley. It’s gonna be crazy. I think it’s gonna get out of control.””
I suspect that the latter view is correct, although in any single instance allowing the sampling increases social welfare. By the way, the music is spectacular. It is not everyone’s cup of tea, but if you think you might like it, you probably will.
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