Copyright kept De La Soul from streaming. What’s changed?

De La Soul’s first album, “3 Feet High and Rising”, has long been the quintessential example of an album with so many samples that it’s effectively impossible to get the licenses necessary to release it. We’re about to find out if that’s changed as it finally finds its way to Spotify an other streamers.

by Mike Masnick from Tech Dirt

For years, we’ve written about the copyright nonsense around sampling in hip hop music, and how it was treated with very, very different rules than things like cover songs and paying homage to previous artists in other forms of music. As we’ve mentioned for over a decade, filmmaker Kembrew McCleod did a full (fascinating) exploration of this in the documentary “Copyright Criminals” which is worth watching if you can find it. The trailer is here:

The group De La Soul features prominently in the movie, as their first album, 3 Feet High and Rising, has long been the quintessential example of an album that had so many samples that it would be effectively impossible to get the official licenses necessary to release it today.

Because of this, that classic hip hop album has not been available on various streaming platforms in an era where (unfortunately or not) not being on streaming more or less means the album doesn’t exist. It’s obviously been frustrating for the band. In 2014, they made everything they had ever created free for people to download from their website… but just for 24 hours. In fact, back in 2015, De La Soul did a Kickstarter project to create new music for themselves to sample as a commentary on their inability to sample others (I could have sworn I wrote about the project back then, but search is failing me in finding it). Both of these moves came with statements from the group talking about how much they want their music out there and how much they want to support their fans, but copyright law and the record labels kept getting in the way.

All of this is silly, frankly. Much of the time, samples are unrecognizable from the original. They should, easily, be covered by de minimis use or fair use. Yet, perhaps because of the nature of the music — and who frequently creates it — courts were much quicker to insist that every single sample needs to be licensed, no matter how short, no matter how transformed, no matter how unrecognizable, and even no matter how much a sample might actually help promote the original.

Still, for over a decade, people have talked about finally trying to make 3 Feet High and Rising available legally (of course, if you just ignore copyright laws, it’s always been possible to find it). Three years ago there were reports that it was finally going to come to streaming. Except that ran into problems as the plan from Tommy Boy records was apparently done without agreement with the group, and where most of the money would go to the label.

In 2021, Tommy Boy was sold to Reservoir for $100 million, and then it appears that Reservoir cut a deal with De La Soul to allow the group to acquire the rights to their own masters.

And, finally, that brings us around to the present, where De La Soul, owning its own masters, is going to put them on various streaming services (and reissue some of the albums as well). 

It’s good that De La Soul controls their own masters and is able to get this music out there for more people to listen to legally, but it’s somewhat ridiculous that it’s taken all this time and had to go through so much nonsense. Of course, it’s still not entirely clear to me that the rights issues regarding the samples are all cleared. I recall a similar effort by the Beastie Boys to rerelease Paul’s Boutique that resulted in a lawsuit over some of the samples as well.

But hopefully, we can get past all that… and just let people enjoy the music.