Record companies and artists selling their sample stuff for millions and the original artist who made that drum solo got nothing, dying homeless in 2006.
If we worry about piracy, we should worry about this stuff too.
In fairness, the vast majority of tracks that use the amen break aren't going to make "millions". It started out as a few underground records that would have a relatively limited distribution. There was a lot of sampling that went on and nobody really thought anything of it because people weren't making large sums of money from it. In fact underground artists would often sample each other too and nobody minded. The problem was the amen break got sampled and almost nobody knew where it came from. It then got resampled and resampled, it was sampled so often that it started to appear on sample disks as if it were public domain. It's only relatively recently that it's become public knowledge. Heck, I'd been producing music for years before I realised and probably used that sample myself. The Winstons would have had no way to know they were being sampled either because of how niche that music scene was (and to some extent still is). So by the time the industry was big enough that artists were making a killing from that sample, it was already out there and everywhere.
I'm not saying it's fair but its far from the only sample to have been used everywhere with little recognition and sampling was one of the pivotal revolutions that gave the rise electronic music.
It wasn't exactly just a niche sample used in niche music. It was already one of the most sampled songs in Hip Hop when the authors found out about it.
Yes, when the authors found out. My point was that sample was in circulation for years back when the scene was underground and most of the artists sampling it would have taken that sample from other electronic artists rather than from the original Winstons vinyl.
I used to see this kind of thing happen all the time and not just the Amen break.
> and most of the artists sampling it would have taken that sample from other electronic artists rather than from the original Winstons vinyl
It was already popular in hip hop several years before it became popular in the underground electronic scene. It was used by Salt-n-Pepa in 1986, and by NWA, Ghetto Boys, 2 Live Crew and Ultramagnetic MCs in 1988. Even Janet Jackson used it in 1990. Heck, Informer by Snow used it! And those are the ones we know. Hardly underground.
In hip hop it was most certainly taken from the vinyl, as samplers with the required storage were still quite pricy at the time, not to mention most producers were doing their own sampling. The track name was probably passed from DJ to DJ.
The Amen craze in Electronic music only started in the early 90s. There was already some break beats in the last years of the 80s, but it was mostly Funky Drummer. It was around 90/91 when electronic musicians started doing it, from Atari Teenage Riot to Carl Cox, but it was already a thing in hip hop.
> In hip hop it was most certainly taken from the vinyl, as samplers with the required storage were still quite pricy at the time
Hardware samplers were. But a lot of home studios had an Atari ST or Amiga. Plus regardless of the hardware used, those samples would have to be stored somewhere (even on hardware samplers) to be able to playback in the first place. I mean how else are you going to sequence it, save it when you're done and recall it again after? A lot of hardware from that era, and especially the Atari ST and Amiga, would have floppy drives and it was pretty common for people to share a sample disks.
The Creator app he runs on the Atari ST is a MIDI sequencer, not a DAW or sampler. The machine is probably not fast enough for realtime sampling. For sampling he is very well known for having used a pair of Akai S950s, each with 2.25MB of RAM. You can see them both on the rack behind him with the round yellow stickers. Just in case: this specific model also came out after most of the recording I mentioned.
Anyway, I was talking about 1986 and 1988... Rockefeller Skank was released in 1998. It's not exactly representative of a hip-hop setup from 12 years before. Either way, it is quite clear that he also samples from vinyl, like I said.
Anyway, I don't see how this is relevant to the topic. My point is that the sample was well known and was used in mainstream hip-hop from the beginning, it was never only an "underground secret distributed in disks"... that happened much later than the usage in hip-hop.
If there's any pre-1986 underground track using the Amen Break, or any documented use, it would be very interesting to know, because it would should be part of music history!
I wonder if there's more to this story than meets the eye. The author claims a label offered to buy the masters by 1996. So there probably was money in the licensing of the sampling (or at least the risk of being sued, and the label was trying to cover its ass).
I don't know the arrangement between the bandleader and the drummer (maybe the drummer was paid by session and was owed no royalties), but, in my understanding, the owner of the copyright definitely was entitled of royalties. In the early days it was chaos but by the 1990s samples were definitely being cleared.
After 1996, when the author found out about the sample, it was used (According to WhoSampled) by Oasis, Skrillex, Prodigy, Dua Lipa, Lupe Fiasco, Skipknot, and in the Naruto soundtrack. There definitely was the possibility of the author collecting royalties from some of those from copyright lawsuits.
On the other hand I remember in various communities since the early 2000s people asking "how do I clear the Amen Sample?", but nobody exactly knew who to contact because nobody seems to know who owns Metromedia Records, who put the original album.
I remember articles and interviews about this from 15+ years ago, so it's weird how no lawyer got in touch with the song author, or how the song author never got a lawyer.
On top of that, Amen Brother seems to contain portions of I'm a Winner and Theme From Lillies of the Field by The Impressions, so maybe that's why Spencer (the bandleader) never got any money to begin with.
I guess we won't know now that both the drummer and the author of the song are dead.
I'm not saying it's fair but its far from the only sample to have been used everywhere with little recognition and sampling was one of the pivotal revolutions that gave the rise electronic music.