Artists "Claiming" Edits as Their Own Songs

I highly respect the works of Ray Mang, Mark E, etc. But why do they release many of their edits under their own names? It doesn't seem fair to me. The new listeners who don't know nothing will perceive the tracks as the results of their own works, thus not giving the original creators their deserved credits. The same (worse, even) with Daft Punk and Justice. See "Robot Rock" or "Phantom" for examples.

you don't think that the people who listen to edits know that they are, um, edits?

as far as truth in advertising in genre names, it's pretty hard to beat!

Not always Scott. Depends on the act and the music. When Quiet Village started releasing stuff, people thought those were there songs. I think it depends on the music and how obviously it is or isn't likely to be something somebody would do now.

you don't think that the people who listen to edits know that they are, um, edits?

― scott seward, Sunday, August 2, 2009 12:55 AM (32 minutes ago) Bookmark

I highly respect the works of Ray Mang, Mark E, etc. But why do they release many of their edits under their own names? It doesn't seem fair to me. The new listeners who don't know nothing will perceive the tracks as the results of their own works, thus not giving the original creators their deserved credits. The same (worse, even) with Daft Punk and Justice. See "Robot Rock" or "Phantom" for examples.

― dan138zig (Durrr Durrr Durrrrrr), Sunday, August 2, 2009 12:41 AM (46 minutes ago) Bookmark

Well . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . you see?

what?

don't know nothing

declarationonalsizationslas

What is an "edit"?

What is a man? What is this wild world we live in? What if not a painted masquerade ball?

If a song is heavily remixed/reworked, I would say it is no more the original song, and it is rather an entirely new song.

how many new kick drums must an edit add... Before u can call it a new song

the answer my friends is blowin in the wind

the answer is blowin in the wind

I don't see how an edit is any different from a remix.

I don't see how an edit - if heavily reworked as some of them are - is any different from a cover.

You don't have the songwriter's name on the release of a cover - you have the name of the person doing the cover.

I mean, I know that I know little about this strange world of remixes, edits, reedits, reanimations, etc. - but there does seem to be a cut-off where a track stops being the work of the original artist and becomes the work of the editor.

People who care about this sort of thing will investigate and find out who the original artist was. The kind of new listener you're worrying about probably doesn't care enough to notice, even if the artist was listed.

you already know the real answer is that "Robot Rock" would have sold less if it were called "Release the Beast (Robot Rock Mix)"

i say hallelujah, to the fifteen loyal fans

pretty much every Madlib production ever is guilty of this

Most edits involve taking the song, cutting and pasting the intro so it's longer and cutting out the cheesy guitar solo and the awesome vocals. That doesn't make it a new song. The person doing the edit doesn't deserve the credit for the song. They just deserve the credit for making it slightly better, or as is often the case, slightly worse. They take the credit because it's cool and it's fun to be mysterious and have people be all like "what IS that song?"

like i said upthread, most people listening to edits aren't gonna say something like: "Hey, did you hear the new DJ Whatshisface single? It sounds just like Can!" or whoever. i don't know about the quiet village example, but i still say most people know what's up. and like someone said, the people who don't know probably don't care.

this new album by KRENG is awesome by the way. not dance stuff, but the whole thing is samples. completely organic flow to it. really beautiful. on Miasmah. you'd never know it was all samples if you, um, didn't know that it was all samples.

http://www.normanrecords.com/images/covers/108623.jpg

Most edits involve taking the song, cutting and pasting the intro so it's longer and cutting out the cheesy guitar solo and the awesome vocals. That doesn't make it a new song.

If they remove most of the song (i.e. the melody - the verse, the chorus) I would say it is. That is, if it is a song at all anymore.

most edits aren't cleared with whoever owns the copyright to the original recording and come out on small vinyl runs. better to not credit the original artist on the label in case you get sued, and yeah for the mystery element too. and scott's right, most of them are only really listened to by people in the know. when's the last time an edit crossed over into the mainstream? probably pilooski's frankie valli thing, and that's because it got legitimately licensed and re-released by a major label with a video.

QV got in trouble because they put the early singles out on whatever we want - so only beardos, harvey obsessives and collectorscum cared - then tried to put it out through a legit label without crediting anything, and got busted. if they's stayed at WEWW i doubt anyone would've batted an eyelid.

also pretty sure that justice credited the goblin sample on 'phantom'.

Geir, what is "song"? What is "melody"? Does "melody" mean "the verse, the chorus"?

If you take a song, and slice out the chorus, it's still a song. It's a different song, but it still belongs to the person who wrote the first song. You haven't made it different enough. We're not talking about appropriation, or sampling, not even drastically remixing. This type of edit has a long history in dance culture and often it's just about making subtle changes to work better on the dancefloor, in the mind of the person doing the reworking. Originally this was just called a remix, but since you don't have access to the original tapes, you can't technically "mix" anything, so you're just editing. Nobody gives a fuck about what a "song" is or isn't. It's a dance track, you dance to it. Maybe you used to sing along and now you can't, whatever. Maybe it used to have changes and tell a story but now it's gotten repetitive and some of the distracting parts are gone. Some people prefer it that way. Some people may miss those parts. Doesn't matter. The person doing the credit gets credit for doing the edit and if they don't tell you who's song it is it's because they don't want to get sued. If anybody's doing edits and thinking their edits are getting passed off as their own productions, well that's lame. Can't read their minds though.

how many new kick drums must an edit add... Before u can call it a new song

the answer my friends is blowin in the wind

the answer is blowin in the wind

the tempos they are a-changin...

omg scott i just reviewed that album for xlr8r. it is fucking awesome, i had a great time.

@haitch: of course they credited it. it doesn't matter. my small complaint is, why don't they released it as "phantom (justice remix)".

*why didn't they release it

most edits aren't cleared with whoever owns the copyright to the original recording and come out on small vinyl runs. better to not credit the original artist on the label in case you get sued

probably because the track they sampled is called 'tenebrae'. (xp)

xp ah you were speaking of the justice track in particular there.. nevermind

how long has sampling been around for, now? dan would you get behind some sort of retrograde push to have public enemy records reattributed to 'james brown ft. chuck d + flava flav'??

from now on, all drum & bass will be known as: 6 Seconds Of An Old Winstons B-Side

the guy that played the organ in "whiter shade of pale" just won royalties suit

if you think there's no difference between hip-hop artists rapping on top of loops and samples from old songs and nu-disco producers splicing a few bars out of an old disco record, I can't help you.

Are we on the same page here? Are we talking about the same edits? Even many of the recent edits that have come out without attribution, the producers aren't even thinking they're creating some great new piece of art. They're just snipping out the parts of a song they don't like, then not attributing it, because it's safer, and cooler, that way!

Some edits get more remixy and involve a greater degree of artistry, and that's awesome, and they deserve all the credit they can get for adding a kick drum, a bit of spacey reverb and crazy breakdown, but even then, they're not taking credit for the song. It only seems that way because they don't want to get sued, or they want it be mysterious. Whatever.

But to answer your credit, sampling has been around, well let's see, there was Terry Riley's You're No Good, which doesn't credit the source...what a sly move...

haha sorry dan i was actually directing that at 'dan138zig' who seems to be conflating about four different things at once, i'd say we're on the same page.

ahaha, yes, it should've been "tenebre (justice remix)"

seems like the issues here are:

- people who put a ton of work into their edits (pilooski, idjuts, betty botox, ray mang, mark e, etc etc etc) who then release without artist info, this has been happening forever and a day;

- increasing amount of people who do bog-standard looping of intro, chop out cheesy chorus etc and put it out - seems like these are done by copyist hacks because edits are cool at the moment and it's a good deal easier to do than it used to be;

- justice and daft punk examples which seem like a whole different kettle of fish. 'phantom' uses that sample from the goblin track as an element but the track also has that distinctive justice blurting over the top, nobody in their right mind is going to confuse the two, and they credited it. 'robot rock' is probably a bit closer to 'release the beast' but it's structured differently enough that you can tell one is not the other. i don't know why they didn't credit the sample, from what i remember the album says something like "all guitars by daft punk" and that's it.

i think that daft punk song is a really good BAD example of editing/sampling. cuz the original song is a zillion times cooler. i'm all for wholesale theft of beats and riffs or whatever, but you have to add something cooler than their dumb vocoder robot rock mantra on top of such a killer sound. it's a waste of great music. and you can bet your ass that they paid a ton to use it. they weren't putting out some grey area white label 12 inch. and they must have credited the orignal on the album or single cuz you have to if you are being legal.

Published By Zomba Music Publishing, Daft Music. "Robot Rock" Published By Pizzazz Music (BMI), Zomba Music Publishing, Daft Music. Incorporating Elements Of "Release The Beast" By Kae Williams. Published By Pizzazz Music. Used By Permission. All Rights Reserved. "Robot Rock" Contains A Sample Of "Release The Beast" Performed By Breakwater. (P)1980 Arista Records Inc. Courtesy Of Sony BMG Music Entertainment France.

funny, i never saw that first time round but i guess it had to be there.

the quiet village record had some smirky 'thanks to everyone involved in making this album... you know who you are' or something like that, nothing about samples used though.

i'm listening to babe ruth's stealin' home album and cuzza this thread all i can hear are possible editing choices. there are so many!

"stealin' home" (edit) - DJ Skotrok

I've always been intrigued by this tacit (and occasionally cryptic) understanding amongst dance producers to claim tracks as their own that are heavily or completely based on another track. It's been happening since the beginnings of house music. And the '90s were filled with rave/house/techno artists releasing tracks under their own name that were basically jacked up disco loops (see "Disco's Revenge" by Gusto, "All Over (My Face)" by DJ Sneak, or "Happy Days" by Paul Jacobs just to name a few). Yes, none of them gave the original artists mention on the label, and it can be a bit snobby/elitist, but it's been happening way before the current edits craze (which, as Dan mentions, can often boil down to a track that just snips out a guitar solo/vocal from the original.)

I like that you can still sort of get away with this stuff, even on a Kompakt-distributed label like Traum, who released this 12 which bases a track completely around Radiohead's "Everything In Its Right Place" and never makes mention to it on the label.

If they remove most of the song (i.e. the melody - the verse, the chorus) I would say it is. That is, if it is a song at all anymore.

Could you mention a couple of the edits you're thinking of in particular here, Geir?

I removed the first bass note of Whoomp There It Is, and dubbed it the Grandmaster Funk remix .....every1 thinks i wrote its

damn, I could never figure out where I recognized that from. ill shit, elvin.

i still don't know how something as major as DJ Shadow's "Endtroducing" with plenty of huge obvious samples all throughout it (David Axelrod should really be credited as one of the artists on that record, no diss to Shadow meant) that are NOT credited can be released in a high profile manner with no legal problems. but it happens.

i do imagine that a lot of the edit thing has to do with the old way of doing things. all those "Dance Classics" 12"s from NYC that would have maybe a track title and "remix" on it were the first bootleg re-edits i think i ever saw and none of those gave credit away. it's just kind of how it is done.

half of those were Danny Krivit, there was a great website of info about all this stuff and the history, but they took it down because it's become a book...

http://www.discopatrick.com/

and w/ Shadow, it's call context. It may have been huge in some circles, but it wasn't on mainstream american radio, so maybe it just flew under the radar in a way top 40 hip-hop couldn't.

yeah i'm aware many of those were Krivit, but it's not advertised on the label! i mean, THE version of "Love Is the Message" is by him and it was illegal and not credited. that's just the custom of how these things are done in regard to edits. i'm sure if the legalities didn't exist, more people would just put the info out there unless they were trying to hide a super secret record....

I think back then it was definitely for legal purposes. I think more recently it's a bit more complicated then that and I'm sure there are people releasing edits without credit for the "mystery" of things. Not saying they're trying to trick people, but like releasing mixes without full tracklist/credits, or the ol' cover the label while DJing game.

hay guys, i'm glad we're FINALLY having this conversation.

some of us don't have anything better to do. Next subject? MP3 bloggers ripping off Bumrocks and taking credit for songs they post by not supplying any information beyond title and artist.

:(

id like to talk about white people, if possible

is ripping off an mp3 blog with no original content even possible?!?!

fuck white people.

what makes someone white

I LINK TO RACIST WEBSITES BECAUSE I AM AN IDIOT.

those guys are all white

funny enough, that's not entirely true...

don't believe the hype

enjoy your temp ban!

is ripping off an mp3 blog with no original content even possible?!?!

for a lark I'm going to pretend to answer this seriously, even though my initial comments were said in jest.

Yeah sure, it's like you have a DJ, and they play a certain range of records and they play them in a certain way, and you love that, so you come along and play the same stuff in the same style...then I'd say you're, at least, influenced by the prior DJ. Likewise, in the wonderful world of MP3 blogs, at a time when most of them were filled with "here's a song and let me tell you about how cool it is and how I found it and what I just learned about it and here's a picture of it blah blah" Bumrocks came along and with zero information, this mysterious figure just posted a song, a day, with no real rhyme or reason other then he thought they were cool, and the site was minimal and hip and very popular. Then we got Lovefingers and Robots in Heat and Keyboard Masher...all totally cool shit and I think all admittedly influenced by the Bumrocks model. That's what I was joking about.

u made me cry real tears

who got temp banned by the way?

the man whose cock made of pipe i guess. the post where he posted that link is deleted.

robots in heat has a cooler design to be fair :D

gordon lish never claimed his edits

he's white

this is really a thread in 2009

its an edit of an earlier thread