Tracklib Presents State of Sampling 2019

This year, 15% of the songs on Billboard Hot 100 contained samples. A total of 17 samples in 15 of the songs, with some containing more than one. The biggest song of the year, Lil’ Nas X’s 'Old Town Road' is built on a sample from Nine Inch Nail’s '34 Ghosts IV'.

Over the last ten years, the percentage of samples in the biggest songs has been fairly consistent. It’s usually between 15-25%, with variations depending on who the biggest artists and genres were that year. 2019 has been a big year for pop - and even pop artists sample (and get sampled)!

Looking by genre, we can see that sampling is most common in hip-hop. No surprise there, as sampling has always been an integral part of hip-hop. 32% of this year’s biggest hip-hop songs contained samples. R&B also had a 20% increase so roughly a quarter of all R&B songs contain samples.

59% of the top 100 albums this year contained samples. A total of 321 samples appeared on those albums, which translates to more than 3 samples per album on average - across all genres. Even the latest albums from major pop artists like Taylor Swift and Ariana Grande contain samples.

The album on the Top 100 list containing the most samples was Tyler, the Creator's 'IGOR' with 13 samples.

In today's digital age, sampling is a key part of the workflow for most big producers. Of the top 30 producers in 2019 (with the most producer credits on Top 100), 60% sampled on at least one song released during 2019, and at least 83% have released music containing samples during their careers.

We're moving back in time. Averaging the release years of all the songs sampled, we get the year of 1998. This is actually 4 years older than last year's average of 2002. In fact, every genre on Billboard sampled older songs this year compared to last.

One eye-catching fact is that pop sampled the oldest songs on average, with the average landing all the way back in 1993.

Despite the fact that artists this year on average sample older songs, the most common decade to sample is actually the 2010s. Even more surprising, this has been the case for the last 5 years.

There doesn't seem to be much love for the 80s this year though, with none of the bigger songs sampling from the decade. Last year no songs on the Top 100 sampled from the 70s, can we expect the pattern to continue with no big songs sampling the 90s next year?

Hip-hop is still the most common genre to sample, but much less so than last year. Sampling R&B/Soul/Funk grew in popularity, increasing from 12% last year to 33% this year. Last year we saw plenty of samples from online videos, such as Instagram and Facebook. In fact, 14% of all samples last year came from social media, while this year 0% did. Maybe we are becoming less social after all?

During the 80s and 90s, everyone sampled drum breaks. Nowadays, most producers tend to program their own drums. Only 3% of the samples on the Top 100 Albums were of drum breaks. This goes for Tracklib users as well: less than 2% of the tracks we sell are separate drum tracks. It’s actually our category that declined the most this year.

But there's one area of music that still loves to sample drum breaks and in particular 'Amen Brother' by The Winstons from 1969. In Drum & Bass (and related genres), this classic break is still a cornerstone and it was used in more than 100 songs this year.

With today's easy access to obscure and international tracks on Youtube and other streaming services, the songs sampled are getting more and more diverse.

Our users are following this trend. The number of different genres our users have sampled has almost tripled compared to last year, and so has the range of countries our music sampled. Western African, Middle-Eastern and western European music has seen the largest growth this year.

While this is making the job for traditional clearance experts a lot harder - it is just as easy when you find the samples here on Tracklib.

Kanye West’s 'Jesus Is King' is this year’s prime example of gospel in hip-hop music. It marks an exodus of producers towards gospel samples: here on Tracklib, it’s even the most requested music by our users and we’ve heard several producers predict that we’ll see many big songs with gospel samples next year.

A few months ago, Chance The Rapper's 'The Big Day' (another big release with clear gospel influences) got beaten to the #1 spot on the Billboard 200 by the debut of ‘Christian rapper' NF. Religious music seems to be a winning concept right now, both in terms of content and samples.

Sampling horns is nothing new in hip-hop (think Tom Scott on Pete Rock & CL Smooth’s 'They Reminisce Over You (T.R.O.Y.)' or Menahan Street Band on Jay-Z's 'Roc Boys (And The Winner Is)...”)'. But it was certainly a trend on the rise this year compared to the last few years. Charting hits this year by the likes of J. Cole, Young Thug, Tyler the Creator, EARTHGANG, Denzel Curry, Trippie Redd & Lizzo all showed their love for the brass section for added power or melody.

A new wave of producers has been conquering the internet for the last few years. Heavily inspired by greats like J Dilla and Japanese ‘godfather of beats’ Nujabes, they generally create dusty, loop-driven, sample-heavy "chill lo-fi beats". Playlists, live streams, and even vinyl records within this subgenre now reach millions of daily listeners. This year, key player Chillhop Music’s 'lofi hip hop beats - music to study/relax to' Spotify playlist even broke the 1 million followers mark and we see no signs of it slowing down. It's a definite favorite for us here at the office as well!

On the verge of the release of his 2019 album, 'Confessions of a Dangerous Mind', rapper Logic hopped on Twitter to share his frustrations about sample clearances. The last straw for him was an interpolation of A Tribe Called Quest’s 'Can I Kick It?', for which he had to give up 100% of the publishing to the estate of Lou Reed, the original maker of the infamous bassline (from 'Walk On The Wild Side') on the 90s ATCQ classic. "Finding out Tribe owns zero publishing and I have to give up 100 percent of my publishing to Lou Reed and not Quest, is insanity," he wrote in a Twitter rant which led to thousands of comments and debate.

A nearly 20-year long court battle over a 2-second sample got resolved this year. Good news for original creators (Kraftwerk, in this case), worrisome for sample-based producers. The European Court of Justice decided that a 2-second loop of Kraftwerk’s 'Metall Auf Metall' was indeed unrightfully used in 1997 track 'Nur Mir' by German rapper and singer Sabrina Setlur. Her producers claimed it was fitting with “freedom of arts” rules, which allows samples that are “in a modified form unrecognizable to the ear.” But this court ruling made the vague grey area of sampling legislation a darker shade of grey for producers…

In November, Tory Lanez released the fifth installment of the 'Chixtape' series, sampling only 2000s R&B hits. According to his manager, it took Tory ten months to create his 'Chixtape 5' album—and equally as long for his team to clear all the samples. Hold tight: they needed to go through a total of 19 lawyers and 29 songwriters (excluding the sample writers) to clear over 40 samples which, according to Tory Lanez, resulted in them losing money with this release. Tory Lanez didn’t mention an exact number spent on clearances, but 'Chixtape 5' debuted at #2 on the US Billboard Album charts with 83.000 album-equivalent units. So do the math of still losing money with such a successful release...

The ultimate earworm track 'Bitter Sweet Symphony' by The Verve is a monstrous hit since its release in 1997. It’s still in heavy rotation—but The Verve hasn’t made a dime off of it. All the royalties and publishing rights went straight to The Rolling Stones, as the track samples the strings from an orchestral version of their song 'The Last Time'. Until this year. Mick Jagger and Keith Richards signed over all their publishing of the track to The Verve. “A truly kind and magnanimous thing for them to do,” said The Verve’s Richard Ashcroft during a lifetime achievement prize acceptance speech back in May. Faith in (musical) humanity restored.

'Old Town Road' by Lil Nas X was without a doubt the biggest song of 2019. Period. The track includes a sample from '34 Ghosts IV' by industrial rock band Nine Inch Nails; as far away from country music as it gets. Still, 'Old Town Road' spearheaded the genre of "country rap" into the mainstream. Incredibly enough, Lil Nas X originally bought the beat for 'Old Town Road' for only $30 via the online store of Dutch producer YoungKio. The incredible success of the track—and the many stories around its original sample and creators—shows that sampling music is as vital as ever.

J.Cole’s Grammy-nominated and Billboard top 5 track 'Middle Child' features a Tracklib sample. Cole and Co-Producer T-Minus used the horns from a 1973 Philly Soul track, licensed it for $500 and cleared it officially through Tracklib. Since they already knew there wouldn’t be any issues, the sample was cleared just hours before the song was released. All it took was five clicks and a bargain to get to a four times Platinum hit. Fingers crossed for the 2020 Grammy for 'Best Rap Performance'.

“Lashes and diamonds, ATM machines / Buy myself all of my favorite things,” sings Ariana Grande on this year’s major hit '7 Rings'. Ironically, the song itself isn’t necessarily a cash cow: 90% of all royalties go directly to the estates of Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II, who wrote the original 'My Favorite Things' song in 1959 for The Sound Of Music, which Ariana Grande interpolates. The strings in the beat interpolate the original song from the iconic musical drama film. And so does Ariana’s mention of “my favorite things."

The track 'Kid Cudi' (a.k.a. 'Pissy Pamper') by Young Nudy & Pi'erre Bourne featuring Playboi Carti remains officially unreleased to this day due to sample clearance issues, sampling a track by Japanese singer Mai Yamane from 1980. But thanks to a fan and high school sophomore, this year the track went viral on Spotify, reaching #1 on Spotify’s United States Viral 50 chart. An unofficial upload on Spotify, under the fake name of 'Kid Cuti' by Lil Kambo, reached a staggering total of two million streams until the streaming police found out and deleted the track later that week.