[ratww]

> All I was saying that there was also a lot of sample swapping going on and given the prevalence of the Amen break I'd wager a lot of producers had the sample included with a percussion set without knowing its origin

I never said otherwise. What I said, however is that this sample swapping you mention only happened in the 90s. Not in the 80s.

Your point was that it was widely used on "underground electronic productions" before it was used on any mainstream tracks. There is no recorded history of it, period. I'd be happy to discover that there were some usage, but there's no evidence.

My other point was that the history of sampling in the early days of hip hop is very well documented: it almost always came directly from vinyls, even when samplers were involved, due to the limitations of the machines at the time.

[hnlmorg]

Sounds like I'm misremembering the 80s then. To be fair, after a while the years do seem to merge together. :)

[ratww]

To answer your edit:

> However if that is the case then I find it weird that the sample wouldn't have been cleared by their big hip-hop labels and that the Winstons were aware of it's use but nobody cared enough to do anything about it until 10 or 20 years later when it was too late

The Winstons leader claims he only found out around 1996. The question is, why didn't he seek royalties from people who used it afterwards, like Oasis, Norman Cook, Dua Lipa, Naruto soundtrack, etc?

My guess is that the track is in a bit of copyright limbo, because it's basically a cover of two Impressions songs. Another one is that the recording company owns the masters. They seems to have been bought by MGM.