Sampling

The “Veto Power” of Fragments: Why A$AP Rocky’s “Don’t Be Dumb” Almost Didn’t Exist

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By: Francis Yoon

After an eight year hiatus and a chaotic three year rollout plagued by leaks and complex clearance battles, A$AP Rocky finally released his fourth studio album, Don’t Be Dumb, on January 16, 2026. The album’s success was immediate, debuting at number one on the Billboard 200 and breaking streaming records for the year. Yet, for many in the industry, the album’s protracted journey remains a sobering case study in intellectual property gridlock. Behind the scenes, the project was reportedly paralyzed for years by the administrative burden of sample clearances, a process that grants recording owners absolute discretionary authority to block a release. Rocky’s public admission that “sample clearances” were disrupting the album underscores a growing crisis in music law: the absolute “veto power” of sound recording owners and the conspicuous absence of a compulsory licensing system to protect transformative art in the digital age.

The “Two-Tiered” Trap of Music Copyright

To understand the bottleneck, one must examine the two distinct copyrights inherent in every recorded song. The first is the musical work, which encompasses the compositional “DNA” of the song, including melody, lyrics, and arrangement. Under Section 115 of the Copyright Act, musical works are subject to “compulsory license,” a vital safety valve that allows an artist to record a cover of a song without seeking original owner’s permission, provided they pay a government-set statutory rate. This system ensures creators receive compensation while preventing them from impeding the progress of science and useful arts by gatekeeping a melody.

The second copyright is the sound recording, often referred to as the “master.” Unlike the composition, sound recordings are governed by Section 114, which offers no such compulsory mechanism. The owner of a recording has absolute discretion to say “no” for any reason, demand 100% of a new song’s equity, or simply ignore a request indefinitely. In Rocky’s case, this discrepancy meant that while he could easily cover a song, his attempt to sample existing recordings turned his creative process into a multi-year hostage situation.

The Legacy of Bridgeport and the Death of De Minimis

The current “veto power” is not just a statutory quirk; it is the product of a rigid judicial history. In the 2005 case Bridgeport Music v. Dimension Films, the Sixth Circuit famously decreed, “Get a license or do not sample.” This ruling effectively killed the de minimis defense for sound recordings, which is the longstanding legal principle that the law does not concern itself with trifles. While a filmmaker might display a copyrighted logo in the background of a shot under “fair use,” a musician today cannot use a one-second audio fragment or a distorted snare hit without risking suppression, as exemplified by the injunction ordering Biz Markie’s album I Need a Haircut to be pulled from sale.

This creates a massive “holdout” problem. Because there is no legal “safe zone” for even the smallest snippets, legacy labels and rights holders are incentivized to extract “ransom” prices as seen in the dispute between The Verve and ABKCO Records over the song “Bittersweet Symphony.” The labels and right holders know that a global superstar’s entire rollout, including merchandise deals with Puma, film collaborations with Tim Burton, and worldwide tour dates, is at the mercy of a tiny audio fragment. This is an administrative nightmare that prioritizes legacy gatekeeping over modern market efficiency.

The Absolute Property Counterargument: Absolute Control vs. Cultural Ingredients

During the development of this analysis, a fundamental challenge arose: “If I own the rights to a theme as iconic as Star Wars, shouldn’t I have the absolute right to say no to anyone else using it?” This represents the strongest argument favoring the status quo. It is rooted in the “Moral Rights” tradition, the principle that creators should maintain complete control over how their “spiritual child” is presented to the world. Under this view, if A$AP Rocky wants to use someone else’s property, he must accept the owner’s rules, no matter how protracted the negotiation becomes.

However, this “absolute property” model ignores the unique way that music, and specifically sampling, functions as a conversation across time. When we treat a three-second audio fragment with the same legal weight as a full-length film or a symphony, we create an intellectual property “thicket” that makes new creation nearly impossible. A compulsory license wouldn’t constitute appropriation but rather would replace an absolute injunctive right with a remunerative right. Just as a homeowner can’t always prevent the city from building necessary infrastructure through their land, provided they are fairly compensated, the law should recognize that once a sound becomes a part of a genre, the original owner’s “veto power” should yield to a fair, standardized compensation system.

Market Failure in the Era of Perfect Enforcement

The problem has been exacerbated by the arrival of near-perfect enforcement technology. In the 1990s, artists could “flip,” pitch-shift, or bury samples so deep that they became unrecognizable to the human ear. Mobb Deep’s “Shook Ones Pt. II” (1995) remained one of hip-hop’s greatest mysteries for 16 years because the producer, Havoc, “buried” the sample so effectively that even the most dedicated crate-diggers couldn’t identify it until 2011. However, by 2026, AI powered digital fingerprinting has become a ubiquitous “digital dragnet“, catching even the most transformed audio textures. This combination of zero tolerance law and perfect detection technology has eliminated the “human” element of risk taking that built early hip-hop.

When transaction costs for clearing a brief sound exceed the value of the sound itself, the market has failed. The manual process of tracking down every sample owner, who may be spread across different labels and estates, creates a barrier to entry that disproportionately affects independent creators. For every superstar like Rocky who can eventually afford a three-year delay, thousands of independent artists see their projects simply die in an inbox.

Conclusion: A Compulsory Sampling License to Safeguard Innovation

The solution lies in creating a “Compulsory Sampling License” similar to the existing framework for cover songs. The law should provide a tiered statutory rate for sound recording fragments based on the length of the sample and the degree of transformation. By creating standardized pricing for samples below a certain threshold, the law would eliminate years of manual negotiation and prevent the “veto power” from being used as an anti-competitive weapon.

A$AP Rocky’s Don’t Be Dumb is a triumph of persistence, but its journey shows that our IP laws are currently built for protection at the expense of progress. By maintaining absolute veto over fragments, we are not just protecting property; we are stifling the next generation of masterpieces. It is time for the law to recognize that in a world where art is increasingly a “melting pot” of styles and sounds, a few seconds of audio should not be enough to stop the music.

The State of Sampling: The Landscape of Sampling and Copyright Law in 2023

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By: Cooper Cuene

De La Soul’s 1989 album 3 Feet High and Rising is a classic and hugely influential record that Rolling Stone recently described as “a landmark of the genre” when ranking it as the 33rd best rap album of all time. Until recently, however, a listener eager to give the album a listen would have quickly realized that it is difficult to find: Despite its classic status, until just last month, 3 Feet High and Rising was not available on any streaming platforms. This is because the album is densely packed with chopped up samples of other artists’ music that until recently either had not been or could not be cleared. Alas, the mere fact that sampling has been around since the dawn of rap music has not meant that the legal structure of the practice has improved for artists today. In a recent high-profile case, the late rapper Juice WRLD was forced to pay Sting 85% of the royalties for his song Lucid Dreams which sampled Sting’s Shape of My Heart. While it remains difficult (and expensive) for artists to use samples of existing music in new tracks, the state of sampling in 2023 is ripe for change. Multiple academics are eager to propose new regimes to regulate the sampling of other artist’s tracks, especially in a day and age where digital tools make the use of samples easier than ever.

The origins of the severe restrictions on the ability of producers to sample music can be traced back to Grand Upright Music v. Warner Bros, Inc., a 1991 decision by the Southern District of New York. This case set early precedent in its full-throated prohibition on sampling in music. The decision invoked the ten commandments in reminding the defendants “thou shalt not steal,” without contemplating that sampling could be a legitimate use of a copyrighted work. At issue was a sample on Biz Markie’s album I Need a Haircut, and the ruling immediately stunted the use of sampling throughout the music industry. As Pitchfork noted in their retrospective review of Public Enemy’s Fear of a Black Planet, following Grand Upright Music it became “forbiddingly difficult and expensive to incorporate even a handful of samples” into a new work. Unfortunately, later developments in the case law would be no kinder to the practice of sampling.

Later significant decisions concerning sampling were handed down in the 2000s and continued to be  unambiguous in their prohibition of the practice. Bridgeport Music, Inc. v. Dimension Films is a prime example of the way that courts have approached sampling over the last few decades. In that 2005 case, the defendant released a movie with a soundtrack containing a track that sampled a short portion of a song called Get Off Your Ass and Jam. The film contained only a four second section of a guitar riff from the original song that had been slowed and stretched to extend to a sixteen-bar loop. Despite the defendant’s argument that the small amount of the original track used was de minimis, the Sixth Circuit still found for the plaintiffs. Their opinion was resounding, commanding artists to simply “[g]et a license or do not sample.” Despite the inflexibility of this standard, it remains valid law today.

Bridgeport’s standard and its rigidity has unsurprisingly sparked calls for reform from musicians and academics alike. A common thread among calls for reform is that a reformed legal regime governing licensing should aspire to more actively promote the Constitution’s grant of power to Congress to “promote the progress of . . . useful arts.” One leading alternative regime is the idea that works that make use of samples include a clear attribution to the original song in their title, much like songs do with featured artists already. John Ehrett is a prominent supporter of this alternative, arguing in his 2011 paper “Fair Use and an Attribution-Oriented Approach to Music Sampling” that the music industry should take up citation standards for samples akin to the specialized citation styles present in other industries. Under Ehrett’s proposal, songs that include samples would include an indication in their titles that they do so, such as “Song A (samp. Song B).” This would ensure that the original work gets the necessary recognition while also providing a smoother sampling process for the artist behind the new work. Others have proposed a sliding licensing scale that requires artists to pay less for a license the more they transform the work. In either case, it has become clear to many artists and academics that the current regulatory regime governing samples is untenable and should be reformed to better enable new artists to create with existing works.