Music Sampling Boosts Sales

This Article presents an empirical study on the effect that digital sampling has on sales of copyrighted songs and how this effect should influence the fair use analysis. To conduct this research, a group of previously sampled songs had to be identified and sales information for these songs collected. The over 350 songs sampled in musician Gregg Gillis’s (AKA Girl Talk’s) most recent album presents an ideal dataset because the album’s instantaneous popularity allows for its influence to be analyzed through a comparison of the sampled songs’ sales immediately before and after release. Collecting and comparing sales information for these songs found that — to a 92.5% degree of statistical significance — the copyrighted songs sold better in the year after being sampled relative to the year before. To the extent that the Copyright Act instructs courts to analyze (among other considerations) the effect that an alleged fair use has on the potential market for the original work, these findings favor the conclusion that digital sampling is a fair use (though each statutory fair use consideration should still be reviewed). 

Additionally, the songs sampled in the subject album were evaluated to ascertain the length of each sample and to what degree each sampled song had experienced prior commercial success. This collected data was used to test the hypothesis that sampled songs which were more recognizable to listeners (e.g., songs that were commercial hits or songs that were sampled for a relatively longer period) would see a greater sales increase after being sampled. The collected data did not find a correlation in post-sampling sales increases and sample length or prior commercial success, but further study may be warranted.

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