All of these postings raise good points, and I'll toss in my final contributions here:
Yes, Paul's Boutique is a great album, but it wouldn't exist without those samples. And the musicians that performed those samples weren't paid for their contributions, even though their work was integral to the album. Is that fair? Many of these performers practiced for years honing their craft for little or no pay, only to have it lifted wholesale and sold for a profit so that the Beasties could become wealthy and famous and get to enjoy lots of no-strings-attached sex with supermodels. You may not consider that stealing, but I suspect your opinion might be different had you been one of those artists.
A live performance which quotes another artist's prior performance is a different animal altogether. The audience is typically smaller, the performance itself requires more skill than recording and looping a sample (trust me, I've spent plenty of time doing both and performing is much more difficult), and the art in question is ephemeral. It exists only in the moment and can never be sold again. Recordings exist essentially forever and can be repeatedly sold for a profit. I'm not slighting the Beasties' effort in the least, because their art (and PB in particular) is extremely impressive and requires a lot of skill to execute. I just think that everyone that contributes to their recorded works deserves to be paid.
It's interesting, I find that musicians such as myself that have spent years honing their performance skills on a particular instrument tend to share my views on sampling; why did I spend twenty years of brutal, thankless effort learning the saxophone when someone can simply lift my recordings and sell them for a profit? Computer musicians and DJs that specialize in collage art usually take a more collectivist view, that all recorded material is simply grist for their mill, conceptually no different than paint to be applied to a canvas. This would be fine if they also took a collectivist view to sharing their profits, but they tend to become curiously capitalistic as soon as they taste a bit of financial success.
The music business is neither fair nor equitable, but guess what, most businesses aren't. I've worked in a variety of fields, and there are good and bad folks in all of them. Sometimes they behave themselves and are good corporate citizens, sometimes they're not. C'est la vie.
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Yes, Paul's Boutique is a great album, but it wouldn't exist without those samples. And the musicians that performed those samples weren't paid for their contributions, even though their work was integral to the album. Is that fair? Many of these performers practiced for years honing their craft for little or no pay, only to have it lifted wholesale and sold for a profit so that the Beasties could become wealthy and famous and get to enjoy lots of no-strings-attached sex with supermodels. You may not consider that stealing, but I suspect your opinion might be different had you been one of those artists.
A live performance which quotes another artist's prior performance is a different animal altogether. The audience is typically smaller, the performance itself requires more skill than recording and looping a sample (trust me, I've spent plenty of time doing both and performing is much more difficult), and the art in question is ephemeral. It exists only in the moment and can never be sold again. Recordings exist essentially forever and can be repeatedly sold for a profit. I'm not slighting the Beasties' effort in the least, because their art (and PB in particular) is extremely impressive and requires a lot of skill to execute. I just think that everyone that contributes to their recorded works deserves to be paid.
It's interesting, I find that musicians such as myself that have spent years honing their performance skills on a particular instrument tend to share my views on sampling; why did I spend twenty years of brutal, thankless effort learning the saxophone when someone can simply lift my recordings and sell them for a profit? Computer musicians and DJs that specialize in collage art usually take a more collectivist view, that all recorded material is simply grist for their mill, conceptually no different than paint to be applied to a canvas. This would be fine if they also took a collectivist view to sharing their profits, but they tend to become curiously capitalistic as soon as they taste a bit of financial success.
The music business is neither fair nor equitable, but guess what, most businesses aren't. I've worked in a variety of fields, and there are good and bad folks in all of them. Sometimes they behave themselves and are good corporate citizens, sometimes they're not. C'est la vie.
- G.K. Wicker 9-13-2005 12:41 am