How To Use Samples In Your Tracks Without Getting Sued | Production Expert (2024)

Smart sampling means doing the research, and if you intend to release your creation, you should always know who owns the rights to a work you are sampling and how to best go about clearing its use in your music. In this article, we look at ways to do that.

Creative Commons

Creative Commons is a licensing organisation that fosters the fair use of artistic work for other artists to use. Their search engineCCMixteris excellent for finding all types of sound that are legal to sample.

Search The Public Domain

When an artist creates something, they retain ownership rights. But after a set amount of time, these rights expire, and their works enter the public domain and mean these works are safe to sample. A great place to find public domain sounds isarchive.org.

Flip Your Sample and Make It Unrecognisable

Slice it, pitch it, reverse it, layer it or bury it in the mix. Then, applying creative techniques and effects make an entirely new sound. This process can make clearing the sample a non-requirement. Yes, of course, the original music is in there somewhere, but you have made it your own, and it will be hard to hear any trace of the original. Doing this can be a bit of a risk. So if you choose this route, make sure you really change it up.

Use Sample Sites And Royalty-Free Sample Packs

Sites like LANDR, Looperman, Splice, and Loopmasters – to name but a few – all offer samples and samples packs that are 100% royalty-free and legal to use in your own tracks. They are the perfect resource for finding good sounds to build into your project or production.

Clear Your Sample

The best (and legal way) to use that perfect, copyrighted sample is to get it cleared with the songwriter or the publisher who owns the rights. The same thing goes for the particular recording of the song you sampled. The copyright, in most cases, is owned by the artist or their record label.

However, clearing a sample to get permission from all copyright owners and entering an agreement is not just time-consuming; it's a costly endeavour.

EnterTracklib, billed as the world's only service for sampling real music, makes licensing as simple as streaming music online.

How It Works

Tracklib is a subscription service where you get access to thousands of tracks from all over the world for as little as $5.99 per month. These tracks are real, original music. No loops or sample packs.

Once you’ve chosen the plan that best suits your needs, you can file through curated collections, thousands of artists and labels, and filter by genre, song key, track type and more. Then, preview the whole track or turn on loop mode to find perfect loops in any song.

You can favourite tracks and loops or add them to your collections to build your own sample library, using your monthly credits to download tracks or loops, giving you an uncompressed Wav file.

License To Release

Once you have gotten creative with your sample and released your new song, you will need a sample license. Tracklib has three price categories, and the category is listed below each track, so there are no surprises. You know the fee even before you download the audio track. For example, a track from a category C track is $50 upfront.

Your Songs

The ‘your songs’ section of Tracklib is where you register the new songs you have made with samples from Tracklib. This is the first step towards getting a sample license. You can also send a registered song to someone else (for example, a label or artist) if you are not the one who should be responsible for licensing the new song. After acquiring a license, you must properly register the new song with music rights societies.

Revenue Share

Depending on how much of the original music you sample, you will share a different percentage of your future revenue. It does not matter how long you use the sample for in your new song – you can loop five seconds for ten minutes, and it is still only five seconds of sample time. The total sample length is also cumulative – it does not have to be a continuous piece.

Over 90% of tracks are in category C, the most affordable category, that carry agreements to share 10% of your revenue with the original creators if you use a 15-second sample.

Once activated, you are free to release your new song, whether it's shared online, pressed to a physical format, or released on streaming services.

Tracklibis currently offering a 14-day trial that includes 7 download credits so that you can get creating with real-world sampled music and download them for your productions.

Header image by cottonbro from Pexels.com