Copyright and the Production of Hip-Hop Music

Whereas the role of patents in cumulative innovation has been well established, little work has examined the impact that copyright policy may have on cumulative innovation in creative content industries. Utilizing U.S. federal court decisions that strengthened the breadth of copyright policy, this paper examines the implications of those decisions on the re-use of original content in the popular music industry, particularly hip-hop music. With a novel, self-collected data-set that tracks re-use through “digital sampling” in hip-hop music, I explore the impact that these federal copyright cases had on the production process of hip-hop music through changes in sampling practices. I find that digital sampling, wherein new musical works are created in part from existing sound recordings, significantly decreased following a 1991 decision that effectively strengthened rights for the original rights holder while restricting re-use. Additionally, I find evidence that this effect on sampling was greater in magnitude for more established artists, and also find evidence that this decision lead to a small decrease in novel works being re-purposed in new songs.