Specifically in regards to being done to avoid licensing samples.
Context for the question. Ava Max has a song called My Head My Heart i heard on the radio and immediately recogocnized as ATCs Around The World.. i didnt think anyone would straight up rip off a songs entire music? Is it not illegal? Is it just cheaper than sampling?
Yell me what you know!
In: Other
It comes down to ownership of the song vs. ownership of the recording.
If I wrote song “XYZ”, that song belongs to me. But when I record “XYZ” in the studio, that specific *recording* might be owned by the record company, the musicians who played the music might also have ownership shares.
So you wanted to put a snippet of “XYZ” into your song as a sample, you’d need to get permission from, and pay money to, the recording company for their recording, the musicians for their music, and me (the songwriter) for my song.
OR you could record a new version of the song yourself and only have to pay me, the songwriter, for the song.
This is why owning the rights to music are such big deals. Two anecdotes are apparently the Beatles telling Michael Jackson the real money in music is owning the recordings, not the song rights. Michael Jackson then promptly purchased the Beatles recording rights from the record company and made a killing. John Fogerty had a similar issue when he made solo music after quitting CCR, the record company came back and sued him because his solo music sounded *so much like CRR it was copyright infringement on their records of music he wrote and recorded!* (he ultimately won that court battle)
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