Anthony Wing Kosner, 10/18/2013 | Forbes

When hip hop came along and started using pieces of songs as the basis for new songs, copyright holders were spooked. Musical reference and quotation are as old as music itself, but the mechanical (via turntables) and then digital isolation of actual bits of recorded music that could be “played” seemed to cross a line for record companies. But a new study shows that these fears are likely unfounded and that the sampling of songs in other songs in fact boosts sales of the originals.

“Fair Use, Girl Talk, and Digital Sampling: An Empirical Study of Mu...,” by W. Michael Schuster, a Texas Judicial law clerk, shows that the potential economic benefits of fair use should be factored into future court decisions. Schuster argues that Girl Talk’s 2010 album All Day (available free here), is the perfect test case for this effect. The album contains 350 samples of well known pop and hip hop songs. WIth the exception of some electronic drum beats, the album is wholly composed of other people’s music. And yet, anyone who has seen a Girl Talk show and experienced the intense performance style of DJ Gregg Gillis (whom I have interviewed in these pages) understands that he has made this music his own through his great love and respect for the music of others.

Schuster found that “to a 92.5% degree of statistical significance — the copyrighted songs sold better in the year after being sampled relative to the year before.” Further, the length of the samples did not seem to have any correlation on the sales of the songs. Schuster concludes that, “this study sets the ground work for an objective financial review of fair use and market effect, which would yield needed predictability and stability to the fair use doctrine (at least, with regard to digital sampling).”

Interesting to me is whether the economic benefit to the sampled songs is more related to Gillis’s powers of curation and synthesis than to a general function of sampling. Few artists have complained about being on a Girl Talk song and most seem to treat it as what it is—a compliment. Gillis gives his albums away for free, mainly because negotiating the rights to the songs is so cumbersome, and makes his living off of his high-energy performances. But what Schuster’s study suggests is that high-quality content confers value and prestige upon its source material, and this should somehow factor into economic calculations about fair use.