Switched on Pop - What Happens When Justin Bieber Samples Your Music

Episode Date: February 25, 2020

When Bristol-based producer Laxcity logged onto Twitter to find out that Justin Bieber sampled his music, he was at first unphased. The sampled material came from a royalty-free sample pack on Splice.com, free for Splice users to add to their track. Then accusations of theft started rolling in. Another artist, Asher Monroe, had used the same sample just a few weeks earlier and he accused Bieber of copying the idea. Laxcity inserted himself into the argument to show that the so-called offending sound, was in fact his, but not limited to anyone’s use. This mixup led to Bieber shouting out Laxcity, giving the nascent producer a career boost. On his episode we speak with Laxcity, Splice CEO Steve Martocci, PEX COO Amadea Choplin and Verge reporter Dani Deahl (who first reported the story) to unpack how sampling works in today’s music. Then we hear how Beiber’s new album, “Changes,” interprets the sample to convey Bieber’s personal evolution in the public eye. Songs Discussed Laxcity - Good Morning (Splice Sample) Asher Monroe - Synergy Justin Bieber - Running Over, Sorry, Available, Yummy, Intentions Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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It's free for iOS users. Welcome to Switched on Pop. I'm songwriter Charlie Harding. And I'm musicologist Nate Sloan. Today we're going to start with a story about how one tweet from Justin Bieber can change your life. So here's Laxity, a young producer from Bristol that I spoke with, who had recently wrapped up a show in London when we spoke. We went out to a gig on Thursday and then Friday.

When I woke up at 12, you know, recovering from a hangover, I checked Twitter and then this guy posts this video of F-O-Studio, the software that I use to make music, and he's got a Justin Bieber song, and the loop at the bottom. Caption is a Laxity loop in a Justin Bieber song. See, Laxity produces sample packs, basically royalty-free samples that anyone can purchase

and put into their own songs, royalty-free. and Justin used a sample of laxities that he called Good Morning. Then I went to listen to the track itself, and I was like, wow, okay, there's my sample and I just think he was. I completely underestimated how big the whole thing was. So Laxity in one moment has his biggest day as an artist, and then the rug is pulled out from under him. It turns out that Justin Bieber wasn't the first person to use Laxity sample. This artist, Asher Monroe, has a song Synergy that had come out. just a few months before that sounds quite similar.

So Asher goes on social media to clarify what's going on here. Asher Manorow posted a tweet saying, oh, Justin's stolen my beat because I released this song months ago that uses the same sample. and I thought of doing that first before he did. He posted something on Instagram as well, which is getting a lot of traction. People were actually defending Asher Monroe at first. Like, why would Justin Silior beat?

I think considering how litigious pop music can be, this would stop me in my tracks. But Laxity did something pretty bold. He inserted himself right into the debate. I responded to Asher's tweet, just saying, No, I made this sample. You didn't. At first, people didn't believe me. And then I, basically sat down, I opened the original project that I made the loop in, and I just recorded a video, just saying...

All right, so just to clear up any confusion, this is a project file. I wrote this MIDI, I wrote all the notes, I did all the sound design right here. A few hours later, just didn't just... saying, thanks, you're now part of it. My heart literally stopped, but, like, you know, I just felt like, you know, that feeling of butterflies in your stomach. Just the gesture, you know, being tweeted at was pretty insane to me. That's pretty much the biggest thing that's ever happened in my entire life, basically.

I'm super happy about it. Asher Monroe's confusion that led to his posting on social media about who made the sample literally changes Laxity's music career. I mean, without this, even like without this whole Ash and Monroe thing happening, if it never happened, I don't think it would have gotten into this proportion where I'm like talking to you guys right now. So this story was first reported to me by Danny Deal, who wrote a great piece on it for The Verge. And I want to welcome her into the conversation now. Danny, how you doing? Hey, what's up?

So in addition to your reporting as a journalist, you're also a DJ and a producer. and I want you to walk me through how someone would acquire a sample like this. Oh, it's incredibly easy. You go to an online marketplace. The two that are pretty much the competing entities right now are Splice and Sounds.com. And you pay a monthly subscription, which gives you a certain amount of credits, and then you can just scroll through millions of samples, find whatever you like, and cash in your credits for those sounds.

And then anything that you get, you can use royalty-free without having any fear of of lawsuits or people accusing you of stealing. Well, maybe not the second, but definitely the first. Okay, so to be totally clear, I could just go, let's see, so I could go to like splice.com right now, right? Mm-hmm. I could pull up Laxity's sample. I could download it.

Mm-hmm. I could make a hot beat or just loop it and use that in the outro of this episode, and it would be totally cool. I would have just interpolated Justin Bieber's cool track because we have the same sample. You would have interpolated laxity, but yes, you could use that for about the equivalent of a dime or less. Wow. Okay, that's important clarification here because this is sort of where the confusion is coming from.

And full disclosure, I should say that we actually have used Splice.com to create backing tracks for our own show in the past. And it was actually through your reporting with Oak Felder that you did a little while back for The Verge that I learned that some top 100 producers use tools like Splice in their productions. I mean, sampling has been a thing that producers have used for decades. It's just that online marketplaces like Splice have now stepped in to make the process easier because going through all of the hoops of licensing something can be very difficult. Right. Okay. So here's the thing is I wanted to know just how commonplace that sample packs and these online marketplaces, I mean, I know that they're popular amongst bedroom producers, but I wanted to see how frequently top 40 tracks use these kinds of samples as well. So I spoke with Steve Martosi, CEO of Splice, who explained to me a bit more about how the platform works.

Splice is the leading platform for music creation and collaboration. And the thing that we're best known for is the sample marketplace. It is how modern music it made. Everyone from like the top 40 producer to the kid in their bedroom, you know, uses us for royalty-free samples and loops. What I found out is that royalty-free samples from Splice are actually incredibly ubiquitous across pop music today. We hear splice samples every day, everywhere. We're in tracks, Raymondine from Drake, Ariana Grande, a little Nazat, all the names that you'd recognize.

And when it comes to the sample from Laxidy appearing on both the Bieber and Asher Monroe tracks, this isn't really a problem for Steve. But he does recognize that there may be some listener confusion due to listeners not quite understanding how music is being made today. Really, what we think is going on here is more of an education problem. People don't understand what it means to do, of relatively free sampling, and that relatively free samples are an essential part of the

modern mainstream music creation process. I guess I can understand how some listeners could misinterpret what's going on here and even see this people using the same sample as maybe exploitative, especially given the context of public multi-million dollar legal battles over a musical intellectual property, where unlicensed

samples can pay out huge fees in the courts. But those highly publicized lawsuits, I think, can also be misleading. Behind the scenes, Steve says, that sample packs are in fact a real business, both for Splice and for their creators. It's a form of collaboration. It's an artist to artist marketplace. Every time you download a sound on Splice, you're putting money in the pockets of the musicians who made it. They're compensated on the download, but not involved in the royalty payments

in the back end. And, you know, now we've paid out over $25 million to artists for their sounds. On top of that figure, what really surprised me here is that creating sample packs at home, can lead to much larger career opportunities as well. I'm so happy that Justice reached out to Laxity. It's such a long jump from this bedroom producer to getting on to this major release. And for Splice to be able to play a part in making that happen, and Lax City to get recognition from that is really great.

And I think the more people we can get participating in the creative process, the more that we're doing our job. When I asked Laxity about how it's going for him, he told me that sample packs are a meaningful part. of his income. It really allows him to be a full-time artist. He really is, he said, putting all of his eggs into being a musician. And given the response here, we can expect to see more sample packs and tracks coming from Laxity. I wanted to go, though, focus in on this sort of issue of listener confusion. And Danny, you reported that listeners aren't the only people who have been

confused by what they're hearing here, that technology has also been confused. That's right, because this sample was used on a third song, even before these two other songs existed. And the interesting thing is that not Bieber's song, but these other two songs, both start just with the sample and no other sounds surrounding it. So I thought, hmm, since both of these songs start the same way and don't have anything additive around the sample, what would happen if I shazam them? And sure enough, it got confused and sometimes pointed to the other person's song. Yeah, I want to do this right now, actually.

So I'm going to pull up Shazam. We're going to take the Asher Monroe song. We're going to throw it through Shazam and see what happens. Okay, so this is nuts. What it pulls up for me is a song called Nate, what is this? A song called Flight by Yom Dada, featuring futuristic Swaver. Danny, what's going on here? Just calm like I see him, Tcha.

Wait, did it really do that for you? Yeah, let's play the Yom Dada song. What is happening right now? And what's nuts is when I shazammed the sample earlier, it gave me the exact same result. So why do you think this might be happening, Danny? Well, you can hear in the beginning of both of these songs. They haven't really adjusted the sample in any meaningful way. Neither artist has.

So I think the software is getting confused because it's trying to match up this material that literally appears as it is in two separate locations. Right. If we compare it to the Justin Bieber example, we can hear that he alters the sample by changing the speed and adding some drumming. And just to confirm, when we Shazam that, it gets the Justin Bieber. Right. Good job Shazam. Yeah. So because Beber's track has added percussion and that sound that sounds like a dying hippopotamus, it is not recognizable as the original Lack City sample, whereas Asher Monroe and.

YMDA can get confused by the app because they both use the original laxity sample kind of naked and unadorned. Yeah. This is blowing my mind. So I wanted to clear this up and figure out why this might be the case. Like, why doesn't Shazam even recognize that it's the sample? Why doesn't it point us to splice? So I called up someone who could help me understand how these technologies work. My name's Amadaya Chalplin.

I'm the C-O-O at Pex. Pex is a digital rights management company. Basically, Pex technology helps anyone with video and music keep track of where their content is appearing across social media platforms and uses advanced digital think printing to help people let them know where the song is. I wanted to know why it might be that Shazam got this song wrong, identifying Ashra Mano's song as Flight by Yimda. And here's what Al-Madea had to say. In this case, Shazam is actually right to be recognizing it because it's the same sample that, is getting used both in Justin Bieber's song and in other songs. What's not happening correctly is that some of the platforms out there don't enable the

registration of royalty-free works. And so that's creating some problems for the use and reuse of these samples that is perfectly legitimate because, you know, Justin Bieber paid splice, place, paid the original creator of that sample. this is a perfectly okay case of a reuse of a content in multiple songs. What was surprising is when I talked to Amadea, she also told me that many of these fingerprinting technologies can tell the difference between a sample, an altered sample, the original track, and even can code for these royalty-free samples, but it's simply an issue of business logic and how these different platforms account for it. So basically, these platforms haven't caught up to what the technology is able to do at this point. Shocking.

Do you have any idea why they might not want to? I don't know that if it's a matter of if they want to or not. I think change tends to be very slow in the world of music and technology in terms of how consumer platforms adopt to the speed at which technology accelerates. There's always a gap, and technology always seems to dictate the changes that consumer products make and not the other way around. technology is actually the leader for how we consume music and how we make music. And it's always been that way for over 100 years.

I guess it also leads me to think about what the sort of implications are aesthetically, right? So I was actually going through the comments of your article. Your article's titled Justin Bieber was accused of stealing a melody, but it's actually a royalty-free sample. You can buy online. And some of the commentators had, I think, some interesting questions about what this might lead to. One user asked, what is a, quote, artist, unquote, in the 21st century? Why do you think this would lead people to ask this question, Danny? There's always been this discourse over people that use samples and get help in the studio

and where does the line actually draw in the sand for what is a professional and a true creative and who is just imitating and trying to be a quote unquote creator? It's very gatekeepery, and it's something that myself as someone who operates in dance music, I've dealt with probably heaps more than some other people that operate in other genres of music. But I always go back to this wonderful quote that was posted in a forum about a decade ago. And this random person says, I thought using loops was cheating, so I programmed my own using samples. I then thought using samples was cheating, so I recorded real drums. I then thought that programming it was cheating, so I learned to play drums for real.

I then thought using bot drums is cheating, so I learned to make my own. Da-da-da. Goes to eventually he has a goat farm and I'm not sure where to go from here. I haven't made any music lately. What with the goat farming and all? So I never ever use the term slippery slope. But there is this gray area, right, where you can be creative and you can be an artist and use material that someone else made.

is the nature of art. I actually think there's some good musical precedent for exactly this, which would be to look at Jamaican rhythm culture, where Jamaican producers would use the same rhythm, which is sort of equivalent to like a beat, the backing track, and use one rhythm on many different tracks. A great example would be like the buzz rhythm. This rhythm was used by Sean Paul

to create a top 100 hit called Give Me the Light. but it was also recorded by other artists and I got to know which one is going to catch my floor. But it was also recorded by other artists like Beanie Man, Elephant Man, and Mr. Easy, in addition to like dozens of others. The relationship to it is like these are different interpolations on some common material. Since these sample libraries are so ubiquitously used now, I wonder if we either go in the direction of more people trying to obscure their samples to hide

or if people are going to be more open about, hey, check out this. root material. How neat is it? We made this other interesting melodic line that goes above it. No, I think people are more open about it than they ever were before. But usually in the past, a lot of samples have been around the drum elements or things that were not necessarily central to the track. So if you're going to compare it to cooking, which is the easiest thing, maybe the Mirropoa. So the things that are sampled are the carrots and the onions and the celery. And now what we're seeing is that the protein is the thing that's being sampled. and there's barely anything done to that.

Let go of my Wagyu beef. That's my beef. You can't have my beef. Cool. This has been a lot of fun. Thank you for joining us. Yeah. Thank you for having me.

All right. When we come back, let's actually listen to Justin Bieber's changes and see how's the music hold up. Maria, you have a podcast now and you need to start acting like it. What's the first step as a podcaster? Well, you have to ask lots of questions.

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And then, you know, I listened closely. I actually even watched his self-produced documentary seasons. And all I can say is this. This I believe. All right. Take me there. Make me a convert. So Beber has his first album out in nearly five years.

Yeah. It's largely dedicated to his newlywed, Haley Bieber, formerly Haley Baldwin. And the changes that she's helped him overcome. Serious stuff, anxiety, drug abuse. mental health challenges. And, you know, where his last album purpose embraced the then-popular EDM craze with productions by Skrillex and Diplo. On changes, Beaver and his main collaborator, Pooh Bear, turned to their roots in R&B with a mixture of contemporary trap meets. Here's available.

I'm available Yes I am Vellible I'm desperate What you made it like Groovy Yeah Yeah

You know we spent a lot of time In the first half Thinking about sampling And the way that contemporary music is made But I thought we'd actually Return to the track Running Over

That uses that sample And see how it holds up Let's do it I dig it From the beginning It was ending We were emotionally Consumption

I dig it I mean this sample in question that we've been discussing by laxity. Yeah. One thing we did not mention is that it kicks butt. I know, right? It's so cool. And even after listening to it for like 20 minutes on side A of this conversation, I'm not tired of it.

I love it. Right. More people should use it in song because it's sick. It's great. It really is like it's a hook in and of itself. Totally. Yeah. It's just so hard to make a loop that runs through an entire song where like, oh, I want it one

more time. Yeah. And it has that quality. There is one part of the song I really like that we didn't hear in that clip, though. What's that? It's a noise that is unidentifiable to me. Okay. And I can only describe as something like a dying hippopotamus.

Do you know what I'm talking about? No. Where can we find it? Spin the track. Definitely a dying hippopotamus. I love it. I mean... You know what I think that is?

Yeah. Well, you know how on, like on Sari and a lot of the, the EDM-inspired stuff on purpose would have all these vocal sample synthi sounds? So this is a vocal sample, perhaps run backward, detuned, repitched? Yeah. Okay. I think that's what's going on there. It has a vocal quality. Yeah, there's something organic in there.

Yeah, hypodomis. Or they sampled hipophon. Yeah. Well, while you cue up the next track, I'm... I'm going to YouTube sick hippopotamuses. See what comes up. You know, you were speaking about the effectiveness of this sample. And one of the things I notice on this album is that it really is very heavily loop-based.

Right. Like, the backing tracks are often, yeah, I will say, like, fairly repetitive, where they're hot, their fire. but what works for me, the reason why I don't get bored is that Justin's vocal is ever changing. He's always surprising me with little melismas and twists and turns

in the way that he interprets his melodies and words. Like if we even just listen to the verse in running over, you can hear that it's almost unpredictable where he's going to go. I think you're giving the beaves a little too much credit here. I mean, he's taking the same melodic cell,

repeating it over and over with some slight variation. But what's neat is, like, oftentimes when you get to the later parts of the song, he'll, like, discard that earlier melody and try something new. Right. And that's where it's like, I feel like I get why this is, like, R&B romance music because you've got, like, a steady beat happening. And then, like, nothing, for me, it's just not, it's not too repetitive in a way that, like, I think a lot of melodic writing is.

And it's not even, like, he's not writing these, like, single note verses, but rather he's doing these like little, he's doing these nice jumps and flows and back and forth than I like it. I'm going to say that this song and many of the tracks on this album fade into the background. Okay. I don't mean that. I don't say it in a critical way. I mean that in a way where it's like, I want to put this on and then go like read a book or

you know, sort pennies from quarters and dimes or just like, you know, hang out and talk my friends like this is it's good it it's it's very mellow it's very chill it's not asking a lot of you as a listener well that's i don't say that critically yeah okay fine uh how about this let's get critical let's talk yummy let's get critical let's talk about yummy the first single off the album we can play it 50 50 50 love the way you splint it on a rack so me spin it babe light a magic you got that jet safe watch a sunset kind of yeah yeah rolling eyes back in my head made my toes curl yeah yeah yeah you got that yummy yum

yeah yummy yum yeah yummy yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah you mr sloane yeah i'm just like sort of blithely nodding my head as i cruise down the freeway and think about anything else except the song i'm listening to and i don't i feel like everything i can't saying that it sounds so insulting and yet I'm saying that as a form of phrase. It's hard to do that to make music that just sort of just, ah, just kind of floats there. And yet, when we spoke last night about yummy, you're like, yummy. And now you've, like, in one day, you come around. Well, okay, well, since we're bringing up conversations we had last night, you said that I would inevitably come around to this song. And thus you have. So, yeah. At least you're willing to have it on the background. This is a song I didn't like when I first heard it, though.

I didn't know we were just throwing conversations on the pod now. What is this? Willy-nilly. But seriously, like, when I first heard this, I was not a fan. It's just dumb. Like, the lyric just felt dumb. I don't disagree. But there is one part of this song that I love,

and I would appreciate if we could highlight for a moment. I've been a Lambo. I'm on my way. Drew house slippers on with a smile on my face I'm a lady that you are my lady You got the young All right, there's two moments you like here Yeah

You like that he wears house slippers while driving In his Lambo, yes And you like that he's elated That you're my lady Yeah, in that falsetto You know me too well Yeah Well this is...

QED This is what I was trying to say about his vocal Like here we are in a bridge section and he gives me this awesome falsetto moment. Where is that? Where is that in the verse? Yeah. Oh, but you're saying that is a good thing.

No, totally. You're saying, like, why are we not getting falsetto, like, out of the gate? I think that he's got to build to something. He's got to give us some surprise. Like, this is, there's always these little moments where whether it's like some interesting, syncopated way of singing a line or just this little embellishment like that. I don't know. It works for me.

All right, let's dive into one more track. What's next? We have to absolutely. listen to my favorite intentions. Picture perfect, you don't need no filter. Gorgeous make them drop dead, you a killer.

Shout with all my intention. Yeah, these are my only intentions. Stay in the kitchen cooking up. Got your own bread. Heart full of equity or an acid. Make sure that you don't need no mentions. Is he dropping lyrics about equity and assets in this love song?

He's actually making a mid-career shift into accounting. Yeah. I like it. I like it. It's nice. It's pleasant. Again, it does not grab me. And again, I appreciate it for that.

I don't think that that's its job in some ways. Yeah. Right? Like if I'm listening to Sorry, like, I'm listening to Sorry. And when I'm listening to this album, I'm just, I'm living my life. You know, a lot of the songs are relatively slow BPM, pretty similar production where, you know, it's sort of trap 808 kick drums and high hats. And then some ethereal loopy thing happening in the background with Justin throwing his lines on it above all of that backing track. And yeah, as you sort of move from song to song, it feels like it is one continuous flow rather than like some crazy wild journey that you go on.

Yeah. I think it's sort of appropriate to potentially where he's at. And one of the things I admire here is that, you know, he's worked with really the same team of people on his album throughout. Like, it's like him and Poo Bear and he like brings a few people in. Yeah, that's true. But it's like there's a, there's a consistency. And I think especially as a, you know, all the baggage that you carry as a mega pop star to have that trust in like, I'm not going to bring in all the songwriters in the world. I think that's sort of bold.

And I think here, you know, so what is he doing? He's like come out of this period of, you know, relative personal challenge and some self-destructive behavior and a lot of, yeah, a lot of difficulty. And there's been a lot of albums like this recently. I think Taylor's album and her documentary is kind of like that, the Selena album we talked about, Kesh's album. There's, I think, a lot of recognition of the, I don't know, how should you put it, the toll that celebrity takes in contemporary society. And especially with digital media and the sort of ubiquity always on, my entire life is publicly available to everyone. I think we're seeing maybe Justin say, hey, like, I just want to release something which is good. It's the thing you're throwing in the background. I don't need to grab

you and make the biggest, boldest public statement. You've already shown everything that I have to show you. And I'm just going to show you some nice changes. We just got some changes happen. Well, well said, Chuck. You know, I love this conversation. conversation because in the first half, we have seen a very different side of Justin Bieber, how his song running over kind of opened this Pandora's box of sampling and royalties and music licensing and automated. Like, it just, it just, it, it fascinates me to know in that Justin Bieber is always at the center of these kind of musical inflection points, which just, it just, it just, it, it fascinates me to know, and

which is something I love about him. Whether he's trying to or not, he always, like, reveals something profound about our modern condition. And this album is no exception. All right, let's check back in in five years in the next album. Switched on Pop is produced by me, Charlie Harding.

I mean, it's Sloan. We have an amazing team who makes this show week in, week out. It is Megan Lubin and Bridget Armstrong. They're the producers. It's Brandon McFarlane. He's the editor and engineer, It's Abby Barr, social media manager, and Iris Gottlieb Illustrator.

That's how this show comes together. And we've got some fabulous executive producers, Liz Nelson and Ashok Kerwaw. Don't forget about them. They help us out at the larger Vox Media Podcast Network. I also want to say a huge special thanks to all of the contributors today, especially to Danny Deal, who first brought us the story from The Verge. We'll post to that original reporting on our show notes. Also, thank you to Steve Martosi from Splice,

Laxity and Amadea Shoplin from Pex. We are to be found everywhere you find your podcast. You're already listening to one. You probably figured that out. More importantly, you can talk to us on Twitter and Instagram at Switchdown Pop. Let us know what you think. And yes, the backing track that you hear right now is the loop from Laxity. Thank you, Laxity.

Yeah, it's pretty sweet. We could just listen to this all day. Or at least until we have another episode in a week. Until then, thanks for listening.