Posts Tagged: "Amalgamation"

The Changing Reality of Making Music in the Internet Age

Things have changed in a way because technology has allowed sampling of very specific parts of songs to take place sometimes without written prior acknowledgement or permission from the original artist. I think in music, going back many decades, people have always been lifting ideas from one another and interjecting those bits of ideas as musical “flavors” into songs. The lifted parts were brief and the influence might have been subtle, but noticeable. Guitar players have lifted licks or phrases off of the old Blues artists, and continue to this day. So this is really nothing new. But to extract specific parts of an existing song and make it the basis of a “new” song for me is a stretch and potentially signals a lack of deeper creativity and emotion. If however a musician does this and obtains permission to use from the original copyright holder, then I can respect that.