From the birth of hip-hop to the ‘90s mashup craze to the use of the Amen break in drum and bass music, sampling has weaved its way through popular culture as a reoccurring thread. Any new work created with the use of a sample still comes up against legal problems but solutions for sampling as an artform and as a commercial concern may be coming through clever use of technology in a new service called Legitmix.
Legitmix creates a platform for DJs, producers, remixers and musicians to legally sample musical sources without going through the sample clearance process. A sample-based track can then be released legally via the Legitmix.com website and their widgets.
Here’s how the process works. Rather than provide clearance for the sampled song, Legitmix empowers the listener to create the final-sampled version of the song by recreating it on a digital binary level using a copy of the original music. What that simply means is that, a listener is buying an original copy of the the sampled source along with the new song and recreating it on their own computer. As the song was created using Legitmix on their own computer, it’s considered as personal use. Legitmix also pays the sampled artist for the song’s use.
RUSH OVER BKLYN by PRODUCTOMART
Brooklyn rapper El-P was the first artist to officially release a song featuring a sample from a big-selling Canadian rock band Rush last week. His Rush Over Bklyn song is a mix of his own song with a sample from Rush’s Tom Sawyer. Instead of leaking the track online as a bootleg, El-P is selling the song through Legitmix. Rush get a cut and the rest of the proceeds goes to to his friend DJ Mr Dibbs who is battling liver disease.
Imaginary dialogues of animals in various poses.
animalstalkinginallcaps.tumblr.com
Celebrate John Peel with this auto-playlist of every Festive Fifty track ever selected.
peelplayer.com
Apple’s new voice command assistant software sure says so crazy stuff.
Shitthatsirisays.tumblr.com/
Justin Bieber has been sentenced to five years in jail…
…Or at least, he would have been if a copyright law amendment passes through the U.S. congress. That’s the crux of the Free Bieber campaign (http://freebieber.org) which aims to raise awareness of a bill which makes posting a video containing any copyrighted work a felony, with a maximum of five years in prison.
The campaign uses Bieber as an example of an artist who got noticed by posting videos on Youtube of himself singing the songs of other already-famous artists. These videos helped make the Canadian 17 year-old the biggest teen pop star on the planet. The new bill would make the act of posting a video commercial infringement and consequentially a felony. While the message itself is a serious one, the various photoshopped images of Bieber behind bars, in an orange prison jumpsuit, crying in his cell and receiving a visit from his estranged girlfriend also serve up virtual schadenfreude for those who have been subjected to Bieber’s music for periods of time. No doubt, the same group of people will take a perverse pleasure from Bieber’s recent appearance on CSI which has been turned into a 10-hour repeating Youtube version.
MC Hammer is launching his own search engine. I know that reads like a satirical web headline but it’s true. The former baggy-pants wearing rapper announced his attempt to hurt Google with the launch of Wiredoo at the recent Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco last week. The service was introduced as a search engine which places a special emphasis on “deep search” and relationship between search terms.
Hammer broke down the concept using the idea of searching for a car. Using metadata we can build relationships between words and how they relate in real-time. So a search for “car” in Wiredoo takes into account more than just the word. It’s also about things that are related to it like who’s driving the vehicle, zip codes, insurance rates, price, specs and mileage. Taking the idea further, you could use this deep search technique to receive pertinent information about your town, city or area from crime index to schools. You could then drill down into data on schools and see their truancy levels, expulsion rates, size, teacher ratings and university progression percentages.
While the demo shown at the summit left a lot to be desired for a project two years in the making (not to mention some less than progressive under the hood coding on wiredoo.com), I have to admire Hammer for his attempt. Who knows maybe Google will recognise Hammer is “too legit to quit”. Ahem. Sorry.
Back in February, this column bemoaned the lack of online movie services in Ireland. This country loves going to the movies but that was not represented in the digital space. On Monday, the U.S. streaming movie and TV service Netflix announced it was finally ready to launch in the UK and Ireland from early 2012 with a subscription service that will offer unlimited viewing of films and TV shows for a monthly fee (which has yet to be confirmed but charges $7.99 a month in the U.S.). Good news for Irish cinephiles.
