Entertainment, Arts, and Sports Law Commons^™

Fair Use, Girl Talk, And Digital Sampling: An Empirical Study Of Music Sampling's Effect On The Market For Copyrighted Works, William M. Schuster Ii

Oklahoma Law Review

This Article presents an empirical study of digital sampling’s effect on the sales of copyrighted songs and how this effect should influence the fair use analysis. To conduct this research, a group of previously sampled songs was identified and sales information for these songs was collected. The over 350 songs sampled in musician Gregg Gillis’s (also known as Girl Talk’s) most recent album presents an ideal dataset because the album’s instantaneous popularity allows for its influence to be analyzed through a comparison of the sampled songs’ sales immediately before and after release. Collecting and comparing sales information for these songs …