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Music

​EMI Calls a Six Month Sample Amnesty. Time to Go Nuts!

Not really. Basically, this is a publishing version of those amnesty boxes you ignore every time you go into a festival.

As of this week, any artist who has pilfered samples from the collection of EMI's Production Music Division, the London-based, Sony-owned publishing megalith that owns rights to 1.3 million songs (everything from Deadmau5 to Slipknot), will have six months to come forth and own up to their crimes.

Upon doing so, Sony/ATV, the conglomerate that owns EMI-PMD, will offer a licensing deal at current market rates in perpetuity. They will not, however, seek royalties retroactively for any earnings made from sampled material.

"It would be good for everyone if we ran an amnesty to allow people to come forward and clear those samples without the fear of financial penalties for past royalties," Alex Black, Global Head of EMI's publishing department told The Guardian newspaper.Basically, this is a music production and publishing version of those amnesty boxes you ignore every time you go into a festival.

"With the rise of the home producer and the fact that you don't really need a record label to release anything, [sampling is] a DIY part of the business," Black continued. "We are not viewing the amnesty as a way to catch out people who have intentionally not cleared a sample. It's more about raising awareness rather than trying to catch anyone out."

The major positive of this process is that the move is an initial step towards a more approachable and streamlined protocol on what to do about sampling. In the prior model, artists were only singled out if they made a hit, at which point they were harangued out of every dollar possible by music industry lawyers.