Rappers and DJs are frequent practicioners of sampling, which is essentially taking someone else’s music, breaking it down, stitching the snippets together, and overlaying vocals or other sounds on top. This has been common practice for decades now, and the inherent legal issues have been around just as long. Is it fair to take somebody else’s work and deconstruct it for your own purposes? At which point does the sample no longer bear any relation to the original? How many milliseconds are fair use, and how many are copyright infringement?
Enter Legitmix, a why-hasn’t-anyone-thought-of-this-before solution to this longstanding problem. It’s a browser-based app that overlays the sampler’s creation onto a song you already own and have on your computer. The file you buy from Legitmix isn’t actually a song, it’s more of an app, a music player that will skip and play the bits and pieces of the sampled song, during which time the rapper or DJ’s track is synchronized to it and played simultaneously.
Take this example, a track that samples possibly the most unlikely source for the genre, Rush’s Tom Sawyer. The original track isn’t modified in any way, save for skipping and repeating. Since the sampling artist doesn’t actually use the sampled track directly (and listeners must already own the track), copyright issues are circumvented. It’s no more illegal than playing two songs at the same time on your computer.
I wonder how long it will be until this process is applied to music videos, where we could load Lord of the Rings on our computer while a Blind Guardian app dynamically constructs visuals to match the music?
With thanks to RIAB