Since its creation, sampling has been regarded by many as a false means of music production. Artists using the technique are ridiculed by musicians for their lack of talent and labeled by the government as thieves. Yet sampling is neither the mark of a poor musician nor the practice of a thief, and its validity as an art form is drastically misrepresented.
A sampling musician is no different than a traditional musician – both use instruments to express musical thoughts or ideas. Instead of a piano or saxophone, however, songs are the instrument for a sampler. When making any given song, a sampling artist may use an array of fragments from hundreds of songs, and must arrange them in such a way that the product sounds not only different from the originals, but also in such a way that works. Knowing this, one could argue that making a song exclusively via sampling takes more talent than the traditional route – it involves the creation of a new tone, texture, mood, and melody through the combination and manipulation of hundreds of existing ones.
Even if appreciated by musicians and the public in general, an art form can still be illegal. Such a fate has been given to sampling, condemned by the government as theft under the pretense that regardless of the final sound, if a clip is used that belongs to an artist, anything done with that clip also belongs to the artist. The logic behind this is flawed at best. The clip may not even be recognizable within the song, however by law one is required to get permission to do so, which is not usually granted without a payment of thousands of dollars. By criminalizing sampling, the government is effectively curbing the creativity of a new generation of musicians, and stunting the growth of our culture.
Sampling is as much an art form as any other kind of music production, both in the musical sense and the legal sense, and should be treated as such by respective parties.