Why Modern Producers Pay to Interpolate Instead of Clearing Samples
A 1991 lawsuit over a Biz Markie sample rewrote hip hop production, and the costs it created explain why interpolation now dominates pop songwriting credits.
In 1991, Biz Markie sampled the opening piano line of Gilbert O’Sullivan’s “Alone Again (Naturally)” for a song called “Alone Again,” and never got a license to do it. O’Sullivan sued Warner Bros. Records, and the judge overseeing the case, Kevin Thomas Duffy, opened his ruling by quoting the Bible: “Thou shalt not steal.” The case, Grand Upright Music, Ltd. v. Warner Bros. Records Inc., became the moment unlicensed sampling stopped being a gray area in American recorded music and became straightforward copyright infringement.
The ruling did not just end one lawsuit. It reset how records built on samples got made, and the costs it created are still shaping why so many hit songs today interpolate rather than sample.
The Two Rulings That Built the Modern Clearance System
Grand Upright established that a record label could be held liable for using someone else’s recording without permission, no matter how short or transformed the excerpt was. Labels responded by requiring every sample on a record to be cleared before release, which meant tracking down both the composition owner and the master recording owner, and negotiating a fee and royalty split with each.
A second case fourteen years later tightened the rule further. In Bridgeport Music, Inc. v. Dimension Films, the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled on N.W.A.’s use of a two-second guitar sample from Funkadelic’s music in “100 Miles and Runnin’.” The court’s standard was blunt: “Get a license or do not sample.” Even a two-second, heavily altered snippet required clearance. Combined, the two rulings meant that any use of a copyrighted recording, however brief, created legal exposure unless it was licensed first.
What Clearance Actually Costs a Producer Today
Sample clearance today runs through two separate rights holders, the publisher who owns the composition and the label who owns the master recording, and both typically want to be paid separately. Upfront fees generally range from a few thousand dollars for a minor or obscure sample up to $25,000 or more for a recognizable hook from a major catalog, with fees for genuinely iconic samples running higher still depending on how central the sample is to the new track and how much commercial potential the release has.
On top of the upfront fee, rights holders commonly negotiate an ongoing royalty share, typically somewhere between 15 and 50 percent of publishing and master income going forward. Records built from a heavy stack of samples, the kind The Bomb Squad produced for Public Enemy in the late 1980s using dozens of source recordings per track, became close to impossible to clear under this system once every individual sample carried its own negotiation and its own royalty cut.
Interpolation as the Workaround That Became the Norm
Faced with that cost structure, producers and labels increasingly turned to interpolation: re-recording a melody, chord progression or lyric rather than lifting the original audio. Because interpolation uses none of the actual recorded performance, it only requires clearing the underlying composition with the publisher, not the master recording with the label, cutting the number of rights holders to negotiate with roughly in half.
The trend shows up across recent pop catalogs. Olivia Rodrigo gave Taylor Swift, Jack Antonoff and St. Vincent writing credits on “Deja Vu” after the song’s bridge was found to closely echo Swift’s “Cruel Summer,” and separately credited Paramore’s Hayley Williams and Josh Farro on “Good 4 U” following comparisons to “Misery Business.” Doja Cat and SZA’s “Kiss Me More” interpolated Olivia Newton-John’s “Physical” into its chorus hook, and Doja Cat’s “Freak” interpolated Paul Anka’s “Put Your Head on My Shoulder.” Kendrick Lamar’s Grammy-winning “The Heart Part V” interpolates Marvin Gaye’s “I Want You” underneath its verses.
Not every interpolation is negotiated quietly in advance. Juice WRLD’s “Lucid Dreams” reused the melody of Sting’s 1993 song “Shape of My Heart” closely enough that Sting ended up with an 85 percent share of the song’s publishing after the fact, a settlement that shows interpolation still carries real legal risk if the underlying melody is judged too close to the source rather than genuinely reworked.
Why the Math Favors Interpolation Now
The appeal is straightforward once the two systems are compared side by side. A sample requires two negotiations, two royalty streams and exposure to a master recording owner who can simply refuse to license at any price, which happens more often with legacy catalog owners protective of a specific song’s use. An interpolation requires one negotiation, with a publisher who is usually more willing to grant a compulsory-style license for a new composition built on their writer’s underlying work, since publishers generally profit from a new hit built on an old song regardless of who performs it.
That asymmetry is why interpolation has moved from a workaround into a standard tool in pop and hip hop songwriting sessions, openly built into how new songs reference older ones from the writing stage onward rather than discovered and licensed after a track is finished.
The Practical Lesson for Anyone Sampling Today
For a producer working with borrowed material now, the decision tree runs through the two rulings from 1991 and 2005: any lift of the actual recording, no matter how short, needs a license from both the label and the publisher before release, full stop. Re-recording the same melodic or lyrical idea from scratch narrows that requirement to the publisher alone, which is why so much of what sounds like a sample on recent records is, legally and financially, something closer to a cover performed inside someone else’s song.
