How Sampling Changed the Music Industry w/ Questlove

0:00Sampling. It's one of the most important inventions in modern music history. Pioneered by DJs in the 1970s, including early proponents like DJ Kool Herc, it became the early bedrock of hip-hop and a tool to recycle the most iconic moments in recorded music into something brand new. Over the years, some have vilified the practice and others have adored it. And it's also led to an eye-watering number of copyright infringement lawsuits in the process. But still, it's arguably one of the most impactful innovations in modern popular music. So today we are joined by drummer, podcaster, documentarian, historian, etc.

0:38He does it all, Questlove, to talk about its origins and why it's such an essential part of the fabric of music today.

0:50Welcome back to On the Record, a music business podcast from Billboard and Sickbird Productions. I'm your host, Kristen Robinson, and today we are joined by the one and only Questlove to talk all things sampling. It's a good time to talk to him about this subject. Questlove has recently released his latest documentary on HBO Max, All About Earth, Wind & Fire, a band that has been sampled over a thousand times by artists ranging from Drake, 3-6 Mafia, T-Pain, Calvin Harris, MC Hammer, A Tribe Called Quest, and many more, according to the website Who Sampled. I've been fascinated by the act of sampling for about as long as I can remember.

1:27To me, sampling marks a turning point for modern music, right around the same time where technological tools made it possible to move music from being made by traditional instruments into music being made by machines, synthesizers, drum machines, MPCs. It got its earliest start around the 1970s, and it really exploded in popularity by the 1980s as more early hip-hop artists caught on to the trend. But then in 1991, everything changed for sampling as a nascent artistic tool. Biz Markie and his label, Warner Brothers Records, which is now Warner Records, were sued for his song Alone Again, which sampled some bars from Gilbert O'Sullivan's previous hit, Alone Again, Naturally.

2:09The results of the case? It became cost prohibitive and difficult to sample, something which became even more strict in 2005 after another court ruling made it so any uncleared sample, regardless of length, constituted copyright infringement. Sure, that ruling has since been rolled back a little bit, but it still had a chilling effect on sample use across genres, including in hip hop. Still, plenty of artists still find ways to do it, even if that means giving away a big chunk of their royalties in the process. Sometimes a sample really does just sound that good. Anyways, with all that being said, I'm very excited to examine this history with Questlove today and about what the future holds for sampling.

2:49So without further ado, let's cut to my conversation with the one and only Questlove. Questlove, welcome to On The Record. Thank you so much for being here. Thank you for having me. Thank you. So I'm excited to have you on today. We're going to talk about the history of sampling, which is an area of the music industry that I'm so fascinated by. and we're also going to talk about your work as a music historian you have a new documentary out on earth wind and fire on hbo max which is super exciting and i i just have to say i i feel like i i really respect the work that you do in the as a music historian i feel like as a music journalist i sometimes feel like i'm trying to capture the things that one day music historians we'll look at maybe like 20 years 30 years from now that's the highest compliment thank you thank you yeah yeah and i'm just wondering like when was that moment in your career where you decided i need to spend some some serious time dedicated to music history because i know that you have a busy schedule probably the most significant development when the roots released our fourth album uh things fall apart for me was the development of okay player as a website which weird enough it started off as a website like hey come to the roots website but then suddenly it became social media where like people weren't coming there to talk about the roots and suddenly it just became like a giant playground for musical opinions and then like three years into it suddenly like i started noticing journalists were coming in and basing a lot of their articles like i managed to capture lightning in a bottle where all the music nerds of you know the time period were were there you know spewing their opinions so i i would consider that almost like uh my my my training training for know-it-all university you know when the opportunity fell into my lap um two gentlemen had come here at you know i'm at 30 rock at the tonight show right now they had come here to uh pitch me an idea of you know they they claim that they have 50 hours of all this footage of this so-called blackwood stock carlin festival and i should direct it and i thought they were pulling my leg i literally thought they were just lying to my well she's my manager now but back then she was my assistant i've i thought they were just trying to pull a fast one on her so that they could come in to see a fish perform because you know when fish comes when fish comes to the tonight show there's like fans are like sleeping around the block and I'm like you idiot they're just trying to get sea fish they can direct a movie and then weird enough I think when the pandemic came like in my mind like I started that project just as like okay here's something real cool I'm gonna do and then people will forget about it and I'll do an album and um but I think timing is everything and And doing it in the pandemic allowed me to really put a lot of emotion and humanity into it.

6:12Yeah, I'll just say that it allowed me, like doing the final quarter of that film during the pandemic allowed me to really, it allowed us to turn it from just a collection of good performances into something really emotional. and it's sort of been speedballing there and you know earth wind and fire is my my fourth film so it's incredible i just want to i just want to do stuff that i would like to see myself yeah well i mean okay with the earth wind and fire film i was so impressed by the amount of concert footage that you guys had i'm wondering what the process is like to get all of those old videos and also there's so much of maurice just talking to camera um which was wonderful and it felt like it really complimented all the talking heads that are current that were also speaking for the film so where'd y 'all find all that archive lucky for us i started the process probably eight months before we started shooting so there's two things i wanted to walk away with one i just wanted to go through all the archives to see what i could find and it was it was everything i ever hoped for i mean he's very sentimental so he kept everything rough drafts of lyrics all of his diaries the amount of times that they've shot concert footage uh you know recording trucks to make live albums that could possibly or possibly not have made it um and most important uh besides the archives um it's almost like method acting i wanted to turn into maurice white so i asked his son like yo can you go through his library i want to read every book he read i want to see what his daily routine was what his diet was so pretty much like i was following you know i was reading ram das it's weird it all is spread to me so now like i get up every morning and meditate i get up and i write affirmations i do my breathing exercises I'm I used to laugh at people like oh you give a 5 a.m to do yoga you know whatever now I'm the person I used to laugh at so you know yeah that's a that's very LA of you as well I mean you gotta we gotta have you back on next time you're out in LA yeah well I think that's so fascinating the idea of method acting to try to get into or to walk around in the shoes of of your subject for For me, I think, you know, this is kind of a tagline that I've been using when I was promoting this, which is basically I wanted to figure out how this band successfully tricked us all into eating our vegetables.

8:54But that's the thing, like they were so positive. And if someone comes to you in the name of positivity or whatever, you get cynical and you have your guard up. But all their music, all of Earth, Wind, Fire's music is nothing but singing affirmations. So you're the audience member. you don't know that you're changing your own life by singing their lyrics. And so, you know, I was kind of hoping that maybe the osmosis effect would rub off on people watching it. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Well, I want to talk about the history of sampling. This is just kind of one of those niches in the music industry that I've always been fascinated by.

9:33And I mean, going back to the very earliest days of sampling, you have folks like DJ Kool Herc, who are pioneers. And I mean, from the very beginning of sampling, artists like Earth, Wind & Fire, James Brown, these iconic figures were sampled so often, and they are still sampled today. And there's kind of those few artists that just get sampled over and over again. I'm wondering why you think that is. I think the object of music and why we collect records, you know first of all i think that records records are uh maybe a metaphorical protest against time moving forward because really what a record is is you're capturing you're you're trying to capture a compelling performance uh an audio picture a polaroid a moment in time and it sticks with you i think the reason why sampling works is because you know i think sound vibration i believe that uh the idea of a community of people creating something together uh if you if you're a sports head and you watch the last dance like the story of the chicago bulls and you see the synergy of how that team works together that's i believe that's the the maybe the underlined reasoning for why we use old music to make new music and you know occasionally i think as we search for perfection and perfection perfection um and i know now there's the whole debate of you know like ai versus making it yourself You know, microwaving versus cooking a full-fledged meal by yourself.

11:35To me, there's always been magic in jest. There's magic in imperfection. There's magic in capturing synergy, like a human emotion. There's magic in that, and that's why we do it. So, you know, as far as the history of sampling is concerned, One of the very first people to sort of capture sampling in a way that we know it now. I mean, recorded music has always been, you know, if you listen to Marvin Gaye's What's Going On. Yeah. There's a moment right after Flying High in the Friendly Sky in which, you know, they're playing a kind of keyboard that captures a woman's voice singing opera. You know, that's like one of the earliest examples of capturing a recorded voice.

12:24But, of course, the sampling as we know it. There's a gentleman named Trevor Horn, who's a producer. He was once a member of this unit called Art of Noise.

12:41He had the privilege of having access to this device called a Fairlight. and a fair light was so expensive that only certain few could afford it you know at one point it was just Stevie Wonder Herbie Hancock, Quincy Jones Trevor and maybe like two other people but you know if you had $100 ,000 on you not many do you could afford a fair light and so there's a moment in the group Yes their song Own Over a Lonely Heart where they have a breakdown with these drums.

13:27That's a, that's like a five second snippet of a song called cool is back by a group called funk incorporated. They're covering cool and the gangs, cool is back. And so we, you know, I didn't know it at the time, but that's literally like the first time that I'm hearing a breakbeat being used, something old to create something new. And of course, Marley Mall will start pushing it forward when he discovers that, oh, I can use a snare drum from this record and a kick drum from that record to create something. And then, of course, a gentleman named Paul C, who gets his hands on the SB1200, he takes it further and he's like a mentor to what we will later known as the renaissance era of hip hop the large professor who will then pass it on to Q-tip and Tripod Quest and then premiering Pete Rock so it's a slow kind of domino effect that happens but yeah really sampling is just the idea of capturing human synergy and energy to create magic.

14:48Comprehensive. Witty. Speculative. Critical. Insightful. Profound. Wide-ranging. Hopefully doesn't take itself too, too seriously. I'm David Remnick, and each week on the New Yorker Radio Hour, my colleagues and I try to make sense of what's happening in this chaotic world. I hope you'll join us for the New Yorker Radio Hour wherever you listen to podcasts. The thoughtful. Exquisite. Just, you know, real.

15:17Yeah. When would you say, because you were talking about the Fairlight, which was a great shout. It was very expensive. And so it was really only in the hands of someone who had already made it by the point that they bought it. Yeah, someone rich. Yeah. Where do you think the point was where it became democratized and became just such an embedded part of early hippies? Yeah, yeah. Yeah, well, you know, the first there was the SB12, which I believe the SB12 could hold a few seconds of sampling. And if you were innovative, I mean, again, you could just take a snippet of something, but it wasn't until the SB1200 in which it allowed you more time.

16:04But I'll say that for a lot of us, The June of 1988 release of Public Enemies, It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back, in my opinion, is the moment, that eureka moment, that Back to the Future, Doc Brown, Flex Capacitor, aha, moment in which, for me at least, listening to that record and each song is crammed with like some songs have seven samples some songs have 20 samples in it and when i heard it the first time just like the the the dopamine effect was like wait a minute dad has that record wait dad has that record you know my dad has that record and then i'm going to now suddenly my very boring dad's record collection you know 3 000 records of which maybe like i gravitated towards maybe 200 you know yeah i'll listen to the jackson five and maybe bill withers but whatever this blue note jazz stuff forget that and suddenly my dad's entire record collection comes alive because listening to public enemy me he was like name that tune oh i know that i know where that baseline's from i know where that part's from so suddenly that reels you in and then you know there's a there's a period between 88 and 91 where it's just like the wild west you know the gold rush or maybe this era of ai where it's just like nobody's policing us and suddenly uh the beastie boys released paul's boutique three feet high and rising by de la soul it just spiraled out of control and of course with ai also you know they were like wait we have to have some walls here and you have to get permission before you just take someone's yeah you know creative dna to make your own thing so yeah to me between 88 and 91 there will never be a time like that moment in which your entire record collection gets just opposed into a song yeah yeah and then of course in 1991 i'm sure some listeners might not know this uh there was a big lawsuit against biz markey and his record yeah yeah and his record yeah and the weird is the weirdest way because really what biz was trying to read it wasn't necessarily that it was the sample um so the deal is is that you know pop songs really weren't like the the the pop music effect of song making really didn't get honed perfectly into hip-hop until i'll say yeah you know there's a few moments in 1991-92 where there's like pop song structure like i'll say that you know for people especially now that people are watching the jay-z documentary and you know the insane amount of people i I got to explain why Rick Rubin's interviewing Jay-Z and why he's so important to music.

19:23You know, Rick Rubin's biggest contribution to the music is the fact that through LL Cool J, like Rick Rubin whittles down what was once like, before LL Cool J, most hip-hop songs were made for the club. You know, eight-minute songs, 12-minute songs. And Rick Rubin's like, I come from the school of the Beatles. Like, let's have 16 bar verses and a chorus, 16 bars and a chorus, and then we faded three minutes, which was like, so when people want to know, like, why LL is so important, like, LL literally created the standardized album format so that songs can be three minutes and four minutes. and you know in the case of the biz marquee gilbert o'sullivan alone again naturally situation um a lot of these pioneering groups that were developing hip-hop before it came on wax most notably like the cold crush brothers the fantastic romantic five brain master flash and furious five those groups kind of in a weird al yankovic way without the humor would take the format of pop songs on the radio which if you're in the 70s like i'm i'm from a generation in which you know not only is marvin gay and james brown getting pumped into us but so is the captain and tenille and glenn campbell's rhinestone cowboy and great song Gilbert O'Sullivan's Alone Again Naturally so Biz was trying to play homage to the Coal Crush Brothers who used to do a routine based on Alone Again Naturally and kind of the double-edged sword is especially with British rock and American rock all that stuff is based on like there's no music that's not derivative of another time So Rock took all of its notes.

21:31Look at Led Zeppelin's, the history of those records in the 30s. So they were sampling as well. The only difference is that once we do it back, it's like we're getting sued. so yeah yeah yeah it's that exact sound recording piece that like i think really got them in the end but uh biz markey yes to just summarize that point yeah uh biz and his record label got sued for sampling and that ultimately the results of that lawsuit made it pretty cost prohibitive for people to sample you had to really think twice like am i gonna be able to license this song um and i'm sure i mean well it's not that expensive but a lot of these artists are on independent labels you know and again people people really don't hold hip-hop in a high art light so it's almost like junk bonds like a get rich quick scheme you know and so yeah right now the privileged few that can afford the sample still do so but as a result and you know i i say this now especially to record executives who are begging me to figure out ways to wake up their catalog oh i was gonna get there yeah like oh you did after this movie like oh my god can you do something with this artist so that we can sell it again and i tell them hey remember sampling and hip-hop like even i grew up in a household with 3 000 records already and it wasn't until hip-hop came along that I saw the value in that, but there's millions of others like me.

23:10When a tripod quest releases the low end theory, yes, we would go to the sample credits and now we're buying Galt McDermott and we're buying Lee Morgan and we're buying, you know, so. Yeah. Sampling has always been a way to promote records as well, or like it brings them back into public consciousness. Yeah, it just refurbishes and recycles it. So now that my generation is now the gatekeepers, you know, people my age are now the executives. There's an understanding now that, you know, people don't just see it as like this clutch of pearls. You're not sampling my music, you hoodlums, you know. so hopefully maybe we can bring it back to to to that format you know it's it's i mean it's happening now there's definitely like an underground network especially like in light of jay dilla's work on this earth you know and now that he's not now that he's 20 years gone and people are discovering the magic of jay dilla like there's there's a whole generation of people I mean, they call it lo-fi.

24:23I never called it lo-fi, but through the lo-fi movement, you're seeing the return of it. Yeah. Well, OK, so I was I was thinking long and hard about where I'd place the marker of like where I feel like really kind of our modern era of music production started. And I think there's like a few arguments where you could place that marker. I was thinking sampling could be one of those moments. Sampling synths, drum machines, like all coming out within about 10 years or so of each other. That could be one marker or you could go to early 2000s where DAWs started to be adopted in mass scale. I'm wondering if you had to place a marker where there was a big turning point in music production, where would you place it?

25:04The Big Bang of Technology, in my opinion, probably starts in 1971. So my third film about Sly Stone, one of his biggest innovations is the fact that he was one of the first people to use a drum machine. You know, it's just that people were using a drum machine more or less as a metronome purpose, you know, to keep the drummer from fluctuating fast and slow and to keep everybody on the same rhythmic wavelength. But Sly found sort of these innovative ways to utilize the drum machine. So I'll say like in 1971, with Sly and the Family Stones, there was a riot going on. Kind of introduces a postmodern electric culture, if you will.

26:08and suddenly everyone started following suit um i also think that um the development of the group craft work oh yeah german outfit craft work and you know 74 75 them doing a lot of experience with uh with uh synthesized music and whatnot and you know pretty much i will say as far as the 80s are concerned and yes you know herbie hancock was the first to use like a lindrum machine and that sort of thing but for me um what makes prince's 1999 record such a a pivotal moment in in 80s production you know i first heard that song when i was shopping for school clothes in like September of 82 and I frozen my tracks in the changing room like I literally standing there like while I was changing my clothes to put clothes on it sounded like music that if you asked a band to play it back to you it wouldn't like it sounds I always said it sounded like space aliens playing like I've never heard a drum machine program like that I've never heard synthesizers that sounded like that and if you were asking a regular band to play 1999 it would not sound like that like it and so for me the reason why prince is such a an innovator is that he figured out how to turn primitive sounding electronics he made it sound human um but also made it a challenge to create so yeah i believe that all that has to be in your vocabulary before you even start with hip-hop yeah yeah no those are great points to go back to those early lawsuits about sampling and um you know how that really changed the game from that that small period of i think you said 1988 to 91 or so uh where everyone was kind of wild west sampling whatever they wanted to to that post that biz marquee lawsuit i'm wondering do you think that i was trying to think through this i feel like those had an incredibly strong chilling effect on music creation um those lawsuits around sampling um i'm wondering do you think that there are you know a bunch of records out there that just never got put out due to the fact that you know they went down the line with sampling they're like you know what too much of a hassle we're gonna hold this one back yeah i mean i'll say this much um uh the the unit that public enemy produced uh they're called the bomb squad there's there's nine albums in their production canon that i almost feel became the blueprint for everything that came afterwards You know, I mean, there's even EDM electronic producers that will probably say, like, if you ask them, like, what's your North Star?

29:19They're probably going to say, you know, the moment that I heard Public Enemy's Fear of a Black Planet. So, you know, after the success of Fear of a Black Planet, I'll say that their production on Ice Cube's very first record, America's Most Wanted, is a great example of that. Not to mention, you know, Dr. Dre was damn near in second place in terms of like kamikaze sampling of that level. His was more nuanced in a way that you could digest it more. Whereas, you know, the bomb squad was just straight up like anything goes like cram it in. We'll throw it in there. Thank God for like with streaming culture now, there's two albums that came from the Bomb Squad that I think are just what sort of like Polak's art paintings, you know, like when he throws paint on the walls and just see what sticks.

30:27there's two albums uh one is by a public enemy associate uh called son of berserk the name of the group is son of berserk featuring no self-control in the band and the other album on that label is a group of white teenagers called the young black teenagers and um yeah what a name yeah um i mean you know controversy was like uh headed out the gate as far as their marketing was concerned but those two albums to me are almost like you know like pet sounds got uh kind of overshadowed by sergeant peppers yeah you know it didn't get its flowers until like almost 20 years later yep i feel like the son of berserk and the young black teenagers albums from a production standpoint were just some of the most innovative i could teach a college course on why those albums are so mind-blowing that people you know just went over people's heads but yeah to me those those two albums are super important how would you compare perhaps the the chilling effect of these sample related lawsuits to something like blurred lines which is much more recent um you know i think both of them had some effect on creation but you tell me i think blurred lines was being punished for air quote something else you know kind of the the the the casual eye rollness of it all of that song yeah but the idea of trying to capture a feeling.

32:18I'll give you an even better example. Sam Smith's Stay With Me is a great example where someone at Yale had during the Stay With Me situation, if your listeners are familiar,

32:38basically, there was a thing where they were like, well, is Sam Smith's Stay With Me based on tom petty's i won't back down and this uh either someone that went to yale or princeton i think it's yale did this whole thing where they were like similar to people who write fiction there's really only nine places that you could logistically go with chord structures before you delve off into free jazz like things that sonically or melodically don't make sense yeah you know like the blues everyone knows the blues is the first chord the fifth chord the fourth chord and back to the first chord that's that's sort of a yeah that's a slippery slope when you try to to to copyright a feeling and so yeah it's a slippery slope yeah it's a slippery slope and it's also just like yeah there are just some chord structures some song structures or some um I guess key characteristics that define genres that really are not super you know yeah pretty much comfortable well I'm curious coming from your background as a drummer do you think about sampling differently than you have seen other kind of producers or DJs primarily come at sampling I promise you that at least 70 percent of all music created starts with the genesis of it is always i like that song but this is what i would do to it and you know a great example is okay so i've been here at the tonight show for 18 years and you know when people ask all the time like why why do you guys stay there why do you stay there this is this is the roots opportunity to to stay in the gym so to speak to work out in the gym and so there's two things that happen one you know we never rehearsed together as a band so i kind of joke that the tonight show is guaranteed that we will rehearse as a band for six hours every week you know that's one but also in creating music i do a little game where i will put a random song on and subconsciously like when they're first walking in i always press play and some and i'll turn the volume down low because things seep in when it's subconscious yeah it's a sentimental message right and i'll stop it after 15 seconds and i'll be like all right let's play something two three and and nine times out of ten it'll it'll get as genesis towards start and what i was just playing but then smart people will change the key.

35:50Okay. Now let's, let's slow the BPMs down. Let's do another rhythm. That's how songs that create it. Sometimes I'll play a song backwards. And matter of fact, speaking of earth, wind and fire, they did that a few times where I was like, wow, that sounds familiar. And then I'll ask them. They'll be like, oh yeah, we ran out of ideas. So we played a song backwards. And I was like, aha. And I'll play backwards and hear the melody that they did. But I mean, that's just that songwriting one on one. Like, you know, some people will get in the dictionary and pick a word and then it's just, you know, that type of exercise.

36:29Yeah, I got to get that spark. One of the most interesting kind of pieces of sampling history to me is the Amen Break. So for those who don't know the Amen break you've definitely heard it if you don't know it uh it's been in god i can't even imagine how many thousands of records at this point if you listen to straight out of compton by nwa that's probably most classic hip-hop fans uh introduction to that breakbeat yeah yeah yeah so yeah amen break is a breakbeat uh it was a sample of this b-side by a band called the winstons the winstons yeah Yeah, yeah. And it was originally a song called Amen Brother.

37:08Kind of a forgotten song, comes back in a Salt-N-Pepa song, and then ends up in - I Desire, yeah. Yeah, and then ends up in Straight Outta Compton, and then it's just everywhere now. But weird enough, even Amen Brother is kind of secretly based on Curtis Mayfield's We're a Winner. You know, same format. It's Curtis Mayfield and the Impressions, We're a Winner. See, that's the thing. When, especially in the 60s, you were required not only to know a particular artist's song, but you know in in james brown's song uh in james brown's show you would have to do cover songs of the day so james brown is having bobby burt sing signed silden delivered by stevie wonder uh he's having uh when he bootsy collins and those guys were his band they're doing jimmy hendrix songs like you had to do cover songs in your repertoire because these are mammoth five-hour shows that they're doing night and not only do you need the hits you also need to do the ballads so that james can show that yes i i too can play at the copa but you also need to do what's on the radio because that's what the people out there know oh i know that song from the radio so oftentimes um those songs will wind up look if you really want to uncover something james brown is world famous amongst sample heads for as much as innovator i can name you eight examples right now of songs that he just straight up licked and he'll say himself like well i invented funk so this this is my taxing like if you if you listen to the grunt by the jbs that um you know uh public enemy sample don't rebel without a pause the grunt is basically an instrumental version of the eisley brothers keep on keep on what you're doing you know wow um so this is the the history of covering and whatnot is just it's it's nothing new in the case of amen brother the reason why that break is so important is uh you know in in london england um with the sort of the pushing the envelope and the boundaries further drum and bass music junglist music the time that the roots actually moved to London in 1994 this this this new what I would call like almost public enemy on on steroids drum and bass music where the drums are almost twice as fast That's almost in a 45, like it's been played twice as fast.

40:03And the Amen break was pretty much the meat and potatoes, the basic food group of you're either grabbing the Amen break or you're grabbing Lynn Collins, James Brown, think break, which we know is that it takes to break. But yeah, the Amen break has been sampled trillions of times, mostly because that break was important for the development of drum and bass music over in England, which to this day, I so am scratching my head how that was not big in America. The only reason why I paid homage to that movement at the end of our song, You Got Me, when I start playing in double time, is because the Roots lived in London for four years.

40:58And every night we go to the same clubs and it'd be the same thing. You go to a club and they're playing Anita Baker's Sweet Love. And you're laughing at them like, are they about to dance to a ballad? And then as soon as that hook comes in, suddenly it's just like a herd of elephants running you over. And that's German bass culture. And why it never caught on in America, I don't know. But it can still happen. You've brought up before in this conversation that there's a lot of catalogs being bought and sold these days. A lot of older music is changing hands. And as a consequence, there's a lot of people who've just bought catalogs that are looking for ways to revive it and to bring it back into, you know, kind of popular culture once again.

41:44And so they're reaching out to folks like you about various ways that you can rework it for them. That's one way to put it. Yeah. There's also people like, you know, cops on the highway with the radar, like, I dare you. I double dog dare you. I just paid millions for this catalog. People are on high alert. There is a company that's actually like, hey, we have a plentiful catalog. Come use our work. And everyone's like, literally, I'm part of a producer's thread, which is like kind of the dream team. It's the 1992 Olympic dream team of producers from Just Blaze to DJ Premier to, you know, literally it's like 30 producers, 9th Wonder, all these guys.

42:36When they came with this thing, you know, it was literally someone that brought all these catalogs. It was like, hey, guys, like I own all these catalogs now. You can use this stuff. and I laughed because it's almost like second to the legalization of weed like it's almost like there's something appeal it's something appealing of the outlawness of it all like you know back when it was like you know I got this thing that you don't got now that it's like all out in the open and legal people are like yeah I'm good I don't I don't want it so I mean it's like now it's like okay private equity guy comes over and says hey kids we have all of these yeah hey fellow teenagers like no i'm not falling for that no for any listeners who might not be familiar kind of with what quest love is talking about um there there's been this rise of you know music catalog owners who are trying to boost the value of their catalog so they'll make like a playlist of songs that they can easily clear and then they'll approach people like you and ask them hey, do you want to sample this?

43:44Do you want to flip it? Do you want to interpolate it? Because they're desperate to try to boost the value of their catalog. But I don't know. It does feel a little bit weird to be approached by a private equity company. Yeah. Again, it's like the legalization of weed, like the danger element is out of it. And once the gatekeeper becomes your collaborator, you start to lose trust. So I'm certain that there are going to to be other innovative uses for for sonic uh satisfaction out there so we'll see however you know i i do believe that um people especially with labels now so desperate to just stay in the game and i mean like labels the established labels if there is an across the board kind of I'm not saying unionize or whatever but if there is an across the board agreement method that we could have you know I do believe that there is a generation of producers out there that are just doing really incredible work right now I mean you know Knott's is one of them, Vitamin D's one of them Stroh Elliott's one of them um you know b-man's one of them these guys who on their their instagram pages are just making miracles out of uh song uh flipping and innovation with sampling like almost to the point where you don't recognize the song anymore yeah to me that that excites me more so there there is a new wild west that's brewing underneath it's not just taking four bars or two bars like they're they're now micro chopping and putting in the blender and the results are absolutely not detectable at all yeah yeah are you are you seeing that a lot of people are sharing uh those kind of creations on social media more than they are on actual streaming platforms dude it is it is saving my dj sets now because you know there's so much innovation out there that, you know, mind you, like, I come from...

46:16Again, I feel like I... Not to keep tooting the horn of his innovation, but, like, you know, Jay Dilla was basically as close to AI that you could get and still be a human. Of course, I mean, there are cats that are... I mean, not with... you know use i don't know cats that are using ai to flip but you know just uh in terms of what uh programs are out there that helps you you know chop your your beats up more thoroughly than 20 years ago where i had to like okay well i take this part and this part and this part and this part and this part now you know you can look at the graph and sort of see things that you could do like it just leaves the space for more innovation so um yeah and i there there are these cats that are crazy innovative uh yeah this brother named vitamin d from seattle is one of those guys um another cat named b man is another guy that that just takes it to a whole nother level yeah Yeah, yeah.

47:33Well, it's interesting. The reason why I ask if they're sharing more of their kind of like sample based creations on social media rather than traditional streaming platforms is I feel like I have this friend at Media Research named Tatiana Sirisano. And she was talking about how she feels like there's going to be a bifurcation in music culture where you have kind of your more fast and loose creations on social media. And then you kind of have just your, you know, very fully formed masters that end up on streaming services. And I think a really good example of this was during Drake and Kendrick's beef a couple of years ago.

48:09So during Drake and Kendrick's... Oh, make it overnight and blam them. Oh, yeah. Just put it out. Put it out. And maybe you're never planning on putting it out officially, but it's just like kind of it's almost like mixtape culture a little bit on social media. It's the new radio. Somebody, I think DJ Cumberbund, he did a really good something innovative between Kenny Rogers, the gambler and TLC's Waterfalls that like blew my mind. and i sleep in his dms like yo i want to i'm going to spend that i want to dj that so you know as of now that that to me is the exciting part of what my job is now where um literally on the way to a dj gig i'll just ask a guy like yo you you mind if i spend this this this michael jackson mix that you're doing right now and oh my god i'm so honored here here's here's my drop box and i'll spin it and jesus like the reaction of it so it's it's even making like dj and fun for me now going back to that uh the drake kendrick beef during that beef there was a moment where it was it was the first instance i had seen of this metro boomin took an ai song called bbl drizzy that was created by this comedian ai user called king walonious He added some drums to it, made it his own and put that out on, I believe it was SoundCloud.

49:41And after that, I wrote a story for Billboard about the potential rise of AI sampling. So given all of the copyright issues that are very apparent with sampling, I could imagine that there are some people who might say, hey, if I could make a Motown-like AI song and then sample that and chop that up, then I'm not going to have any rights issues. I'm just kind of wondering what you think about that kind of thing and if you've seen it start to happen. Yeah, I mean, here's the truth. When it first came out, you know, I think one of the first examples I saw of it was they somehow had a Barry White figure singing an 8-Ball and MJG song or, you know, like a Biggie song or whatever.

50:35You know, similar to social media. It was all fun and games like, ah, that's cute. That's funny. however from a sonic standpoint uh i'm not there yet because you know i'm i'm sensitive to digital distortion so from a sonic standpoint i'm kind of like all right well you know it's it's interesting for three seconds that you're scrolling on your social media but i would never play this in concert nor would I sample it because I hate sonic digital distortion. However, we all know that, you know, 10 years from now, when they do version 7.0, whatever, they'll perfect it. But even then, similar to sampling culture, which is pretty much what I see this as the parallel of.

51:36like again the whole thing is like to ai or not to ai half the people are like well it's going to happen anyway so we might as well jump on the bandwagon and other people are like no why are you taking intellectual property and stealing it and blah blah blah blah blah similar to sampling i think that there should be uh compensation you know if you are building an ai device and whatnot you know you should be transparent to which what materials that you're using to build your platform there should definitely be compensation behind it so that and not in the way I never liked the sampling laws for record labels which pretty much only paid the publisher and paid the record label Clyde Stubblefield is getting no parts of anyone sampling Funky Drummer, even though Clyde Stubblefield, his drums via James Brown are in over 4 ,000 song samples.