Sampling

I was watching Videodrome last night for the first time and kept noticing some very dark, potentially breakdown-worthy samples throughout.

A younger me would have just ripped the audio straight away...an older me waited until this morning and found out that the DVD had already been sent away in its little Lovefilm packet...but anyway...

I'm basically scared of using samples from movies now because I don't want there to be any barrier to my tracks getting a release. I don't want to cause any problems for a label so I just leave everything nicely legal.

Lawsuits over samples only happen to extremely popular tunes, but what if (for example) one of my tracks got licensed to a compilation? Anyway, the point is not that I'm likely to have a Top 10 EUROHIT at any point in the next five years, but that sampling is seen as an impediment to a legal release by a lot of labels.

I tended to use speech samples really prominently in my older stuff because I basically knew it was for a small audience and nobody would ever bat an eyelid. Loads of musicians do the same.

Obviously, you are using someone else's work and not paying them for it - a friend made the point to me a few years ago that a great deal of effort has to be put in to get movie sound to a finished state, and simply grabbing a cool-sounding vocal snippet from the soundtrack is essentially piggybacking on a load of people.

But fundamentally, it makes me sad. It sucks the fun out of production: the era where you could just grab anything is gone and that's definitely, categorically a bad thing for electronic music.

I actually don't know if I should just bash on regardless, get to the stage where labels are willing to shoulder the burden or negotiate for rights on my behalf, or if I have to leave this side of my production behind.