Sample clearance: what you owe on the master and the publishing, separately

63 · 2026-10-01 · 21 min read · Español

A sample uses two copyrights that belong to other people — the sound recording and the song inside it — and each one needs its own licence from its own owner. Neither is compulsory. The recording’s owner grants a master use licence; the song’s publisher grants a licence for the composition, and the price on that side is often a share of your new song. Replay the part yourself and the first licence falls away. The second does not. No length is free by rule.

• A sample copies the sound recording and the musical work embodied in it. Each is a separate copyright with a separate owner, and each owner’s permission is a separate permission.
• The master use licence comes from whoever owns the sound recording today. The composition licence comes from the song’s publisher or publishers. No compulsory licence covers either use.
• A re-recording that copies no sound from the original needs no licence from the recording’s owner and still needs one from the song’s owner.
• No statute in the United States or Canada names a length below which a sample is free. One US appeals court refuses any threshold for sound recordings; the other asks whether an average listener would recognise the sample.
• A composition licence is often paid as a share of the new song, so the sampled writers go on the new song’s split sheet and its registration. The licence’s scope clause — how much, in which song, for which uses — is the licence.

What do you actually owe when you sample a record?

A licence from the recording’s owner and a separate one from the song’s owner: a sample copies both copyrights, and neither licence is compulsory.

Start with what a sample is, in the statute’s terms rather than the studio’s. Every released record is two works, and the line between them has its own page: a sound recording, owned by whoever made or bought it, and a musical work — the song — owned by whoever wrote it or bought that. The owner of each has the exclusive right “to reproduce the copyrighted work in copies or phonorecords” and “to prepare derivative works based upon the copyrighted work” — section 106, clauses (1) and (2). For the recording, section 114(b) says what those two rights reach: copies “that directly or indirectly recapture the actual sounds fixed in the recording,” and derivative works “in which the actual sounds fixed in the sound recording are rearranged, remixed, or otherwise altered in sequence or quality.” Read that clause again. It is a legal description of a sample — the actual sounds, altered in sequence or quality — and it has been in the statute since 1976.

So a drum break lifted from a record is a copy of the recording and a copy of whatever part of the song is in those two bars, and each copy needs the owner of the thing copied. The compulsory licence that lets anyone record a cover does not reach either: the statute refuses it to a record that duplicates a recording fixed by somebody else unless that recording’s owner said yes, and for the recording itself there is no compulsory licence at all. Nor does the cover licence stretch to the song side of a sample — it covers a rendition of the song and cannot “change the basic melody or fundamental character of the work,” and a song built around four bars of another has changed it. A cover is a different page and a different, cheaper piece of paper. Canada arrives at the same two doors by its own route: copyright in a work is “the sole right to produce or reproduce the work or any substantial part thereof in any material form whatever” — section 3(1) — and the maker of a recording holds the same right over the recording “or any substantial part thereof” — section 18(1), and who the maker is has its own page. CMRRA puts both doors in one sentence: “To legally sample a song or recording you don’t own, you need permission from the copyright owners of both the song and the recording.”

The two permissions have names. The recording’s is a master use licence, and the piece on what owning a master gets you describes it from the owner’s chair. The song’s is usually called a sample licence, sometimes a publishing clearance, and it comes from a different building. If the record you sampled was self-released by somebody who wrote it, one person holds both, which shortens the walk and changes nothing about it: you still sign two grants of two rights, even if they arrive on one page. The Great Pyramid needed one pharaoh’s permission. Four bars of somebody else’s drummer need two.

Who do you ask for each one?

The master use licence comes from whoever owns the recording today; the composition licence comes from the song’s publishers, found in a society’s repertory search.

The recording first. Its owner is whoever holds the sound recording’s copyright now — the label that released it, or the artist if nobody ever took it, or the company that bought the label since. Ownership “may be transferred in whole or in part by any means of conveyance or by operation of law” (section 201(d)), and a catalogue sale is exactly that conveyance, so the name on a 1974 sleeve is the owner in 1974. Labels get bought. The recording goes with the building, like the office plants. The ℗ line on the streaming page is where to start and not where to stop: it is a claim in the shape of a notice, typed by whoever delivered the release, and the distributor’s name beside it is the party licensed to deliver, not the owner. Write to the ℗ name; expect to be forwarded.

The song second, and it is the easier lookup and the harder conversation. Every society publishes its repertory, and the IPI piece walks the public searches: a song comes back by title, by writer name or by its ISWC, with its writers and its publishers listed, and the publisher listed there is who grants the licence. A song with three publishers is three conversations, and here the two countries part. In the United States, any co-owner of a song may grant a non-exclusive licence to the whole of it and owes the others an accounting, so one publisher’s yes is a licence in law — the rule and its cases are on the page about an unsigned split sheet. Publishers know that rule and ask you for every co-owner anyway, because a licence that names all of them is the one that survives the dispute. In Canada the consent of every co-owner is required to license a jointly owned work, and one unreachable co-owner is a song nobody can license at all. Same lookup, opposite failure.

What if you replay it instead of sampling it?

A re-recording that copies no sound from the original needs no licence from the recording’s owner, and still needs one from the song’s owner.

This is the seam in the statute, and it is the most useful sentence a sampling producer can know. Section 114(b)’s third sentence puts a recording made “entirely of an independent fixation of other sounds” outside the recording owner’s rights, even when the new sounds imitate the old — the master piece quotes it in full and calls it the seam between the two copyrights, seen from the recording side. Seen from your side it means this: if you hire a drummer, cut the break yourself and match it to the grain, the owner of the original recording has no right in what you made. The Sixth Circuit said so in the same breath as its hardest line on sampling — an artist who wants a riff “is free to duplicate the sound of that ‘riff’ in the studio.” The industry calls the result an interpolation, and DistroKid’s definition is as good as any: a musical element “re-recorded … from a previously recorded song into a new composition,” which “does not use any audio from the original recording.”

What does not change is the song. The melody you replayed is still somebody’s musical work, your new song is still a derivative of it, and the publisher is still the publisher. A cover licence does not do this job either — DistroKid’s page says its cover licensing “does not apply to interpolations,” and the reason is the clause from the first section: a compulsory licence covers the song as written, not the song as rebuilt into yours. So replaying takes one owner off the table and leaves the other exactly where they were, holding the same share of your new song they would have held for a sample. One distributor goes further than the statute: TuneCore’s page lists interpolations beside samples and asks for a master use licence for both. A replay copies no recording and the statute asks for none; whether the distributor asks for one anyway is the distributor’s rule to make, and its answer to a missing licence is not to deliver. Two things this section is not about: a soundalike sold as the original is the master piece’s problem, and a remix — a record rebuilt from the original’s own stems — is a sample of a whole record, and who owns the result is another question and another page.

Is there a length below which you don’t need clearance?

No. No statute names a length; one US appeals court refuses any threshold, and the other asks whether an average listener would recognise the sample.

Two courts have answered this at appellate level in the United States, and they disagree. In Bridgeport Music v. Dimension Films (Sixth Circuit, 2005) the sample was two seconds of a four-second, three-note guitar riff; “the pitch was lowered, and the copied piece was ‘looped’ and extended to 16 beats.” The district court had called it too small to matter. The appeals court reversed and refused the question outright: “a sound recording owner has the exclusive right to ‘sample’ his own recording,” and then the sentence every clearance lawyer has framed — “Get a license or do not sample.” The court knew what it was doing and said so: asked why three notes taken from a composition might pass and three notes sampled from a recording never do, it answered “We think this result is dictated by the applicable statute.” Eleven years later, in VMG Salsoul v. Ciccone (Ninth Circuit, 2016), the sample was a “0.23-second segment of horns” and the court went the other way, holding that the ordinary rule applies to recordings too — “a use is de minimis only if the average audience would not recognize the appropriation” — and saying, in as many words, that it would “take the unusual step of creating a circuit split by disagreeing with the Sixth Circuit’s contrary holding in Bridgeport.”

Put the two side by side and notice what neither contains. One court says every sample of a recording needs a licence, however short. The other says a sample is free only if an average listener would not recognise it — a test about recognition, not duration. Neither names a number of seconds, because there isn’t one. A release goes to every circuit at once, so the rule that governs your record is whichever one the owner sues under, and the owner picks. Anyone who gives you a number is not quoting a court. They are bullshitting you with a stopwatch.

Canada asks a different question and gets to the same place. Both rights run to “any substantial part” of the work or the recording, and substantial is a judgment about quality and importance, not a clock — a recognisable two seconds can be substantial and a forgettable eight may not be, and no Canadian appellate court has drawn the sampling line the way either American court did, so nothing on this page should be read as saying one has. The one exception Canada does write down is narrow and named: section 29.21 lets an individual use an existing work in creating a new one on four conditions, and the first is that the use is “solely for non-commercial purposes”; the other three are that the source is named where reasonable, that the individual had reasonable grounds to think the original was not itself infringing, and that the new work does no substantial harm to the original’s market. A record in the stores fails the first condition on the day it goes live. The United States has no equivalent exception; fair use exists there as a defence, and neither opinion above decided its case on it.

What does a sample licence actually say?

The recording, the portion, the new song, the uses, territory, term and price, and the share of your new song the sampled writers now hold.

The master use licence is the simpler document. It names the recording and the portion — by timecode, by bars, by a description of the part — and the new record it may appear in; it grants the reproduction and distribution of that portion inside that record, for named media and territories, for a term; and it prices the grant as a flat fee, or a royalty per unit or per stream, or both, sometimes with a share of the new master on top. It usually requires a credit and sometimes forbids a title that borrows the original’s. Nothing in it touches your song.

The composition licence is the one that changes what you own. It is priced the same three ways — a fee, a percentage, or both — but the percentage is a share of your new song, granted to the sampled song’s writers and publisher, and a share of a song is a writer share. It goes on your split sheet, on your PRO registration of the new work and on your MLC registration, beside your own name, in whatever number the licence says. The split sheet’s boundary page puts the sample outside the sheet, as a document, and that is right; the sample’s consequence walks straight back in as a row. The sampled writers did not write your song and authorship’s test would fail them; they hold a share of it anyway, by contract, which is a different door into the same room. Tracklib, which pre-clears the samples in its own catalogue, states the shape plainly for its licences: a share of your song’s revenue “both from master and publishing revenue,” sized by “which category the sampled song is in and how long the sample is” — licensed at up to 2, 15 or 60 seconds — and if you register the song with a PRO, “you must include the original rightsholders of the sampled song in your works registration.” Even the marketplace that made this easy prices both sides and puts the writers on your registration.

Then the clause that decides everything, and the one story worth telling once. In 1997 The Verve released Bitter Sweet Symphony over a four-second loop of an orchestral recording of a Rolling Stones song, under a licence. A dispute over how much of the recording the song had used ended with Jagger and Richards added as co-writers and the band relinquishing the song’s royalties to the sample’s publisher; in 2019, twenty-two years on, Jagger and Richards passed their credit and their share back to Richard Ashcroft. The lesson is not about the parties. It is that the scope clause is the licence: a signed permission for four bars is a signed permission for four bars, and eight is an infringement with a receipt attached. Name the seconds, the uses and the versions — the album cut, the radio edit, the instrumental, the video — in words, and have the licensor initial the audio. What none of this page states is a price, because no standard exists and nobody publishes one; the two figures a sample licence turns on are whatever the owner asks and whatever you can replace it with.

What happens at the distributor, the registry and the credits?

The distributor asks whether the sample is cleared and checks nothing; the Copyright Office registers the new recording with the sampled material excluded.

The distributors say what they do in their own words. DistroKid: “we cannot help approve the use of samples from other songs in your music. Stores do not allow you to use another artist’s stem or sample without their permission.” Royalty-free libraries and the sounds that ship inside a DAW are fine, and a song cleared through Tracklib is uploaded with the licensor added to its Splits at the licensed percentage. TuneCore, on the same page as its cover rules: “You cannot distribute any content through TuneCore if you do not have 100% of the rights to that content.” Read the shape of those sentences. The distributor’s question about samples is a warranty you sign, not a check it runs; nobody listens to the file, and the licence lives in your drawer. When a claim comes in, the sentence you agreed to is the one that decides whose problem it is, and it names you.

The registry is more careful than the distributor and asks you to be. The Copyright Office’s Circular 56 calls a recording with a sample in it a derivative sound recording — one that “incorporates preexisting sounds, such as sounds that were previously registered or published” — and tells you how to register it: “identify the preexisting material in the ‘material excluded’ field and identify the new material in the ‘new material included’ field.” Your registration claims what you made and disclaims what you borrowed, in two boxes, and a registration that claims the sampled bars as yours is a false statement to the Office about somebody else’s property. The same circular states the two-copyright fact in one line — the copyright in a sound recording “does not cover the music, lyrics, words, or other underlying content embodied in that recording” — so the song side of your new work is a separate registration with its own excluded material, which is the sampled melody.

The credit is the last stop and the least of the three. Apple’s style guide credits the artist a sample came from with a Sampled Artist role and refuses them a featuring credit, and the credits piece already states the thing that matters here: whether the sample was cleared is a licensing question, and no credit answers it. Put the role in the field the licence requires. Do not mistake it for the licence.

What if it’s already out?

An uncleared sample on a released record is two claims against you, one per copyright; a licence signed now reaches back only in writing.

State the exposure once, plainly. Every copy the stores serve is a reproduction of two works you did not license, each with its own owner and its own remedy. In the United States, where the sampled work was registered before the infringement began or within three months of its first publication (section 412), the owner may elect statutory damages of “not less than $750 or more than $30,000” per work, and where the infringement was wilful a court “may increase the award of statutory damages to a sum of not more than $150,000” — section 504(c). Two works, two awards. In Canada, section 38.1 sets statutory damages for commercial infringement at “not less than $500 and not more than $20,000” per work. Those are the ranges a letter will quote at you, and the reason the letter usually opens with a licence offer instead.

Three exits, in the order to try them. First, take it down, clear it, and re-deliver: the take-down stops the meter, and how long the stores take to act on one is its own page. Second, clear it in place — the same two conversations as before release, with a worse hand, and one sentence to insist on in each licence: that the grant reaches back to the release date in words, because a licence dated today covers today onward and the owners know what the back catalogue of streams is worth. Third, replace the sample with a replay and re-deliver; that drops the master owner from the conversation, keeps the publisher in it, and produces a new recording, which the version page says takes a new ISRC rather than a quiet swap under the old one. Every stream until then is one more reproduction of two things you never licensed, and the meter is running on both.

It stops being paperwork the day an owner writes to you — a claim letter, a lawyer’s email, a Content ID claim on the video that names the recording. From that day the two conversations are a negotiation with a deadline, and where counsel comes from and what they do with the file are each their own page. What you bring them is the record, the original, the timecodes of every use, the two owners as best you have found them, and every message you have sent or received about it.

This week: list every release you have with a sound in it that is not yours — a break, a chop, a stab, a vocal — and write the two owners beside each one, the recording’s and the song’s. Then put the paper you hold beside each name, or the blank where it should be. The audit checklist has a line for it. Most of the blanks are the second column, and that is the column that owns a share of your song.

FAQ

If the song is public domain, is the recording free to sample?

No. The song and the recording expire on different clocks. In the United States a recording first published between 1957 and 14 February 1972 stays protected until 15 February 2067 under section 1401; in Canada a published recording lasts up to 75 years from publication. A public-domain song on a protected recording needs the recording’s owner and nobody else.

Do I need clearance if I’m giving the track away for free?

Yes, in both countries, for both copyrights. Copying is copying whether or not money changes hands. Canada’s non-commercial user-generated-content exception covers an individual’s non-commercial use with the source named and no substantial harm to the original’s market; a release in the stores is commercial, and the United States has no such exception.

Do I need every co-owner of the sampled song to agree?

In the United States, a licence from one co-owner is valid in law and that co-owner owes the others an accounting; publishers ask for every co-owner anyway, and a licence that names all of them is the one that survives a dispute. In Canada, every co-owner’s consent is required.

Does crediting the sampled artist count as clearance?

No. A credit is a statement about who made what; a licence is a signed permission from the owner of each copyright. Apple’s style guide has a Sampled Artist role, and using it says nothing about whether the sample was cleared.

Sources

• 17 U.S.C. § 106 (Cornell LII) — the exclusive rights, including (1) reproduction in copies or phonorecords and (2) the preparation of derivative works.
• 17 U.S.C. § 114 — (b): the recording owner’s reproduction right reaches copies that directly or indirectly recapture the actual sounds fixed in the recording; the derivative-work right reaches works in which those sounds are rearranged, remixed or otherwise altered in sequence or quality; neither reaches an independent fixation of other sounds that imitates them.
• 17 U.S.C. § 115 — (a)(1)(B): no compulsory licence for phonorecords duplicating a sound recording fixed by another unless that recording’s owner authorised it; (a)(2): the arrangement privilege shall not change the basic melody or fundamental character of the work.
• 17 U.S.C. § 201 — (d)(1): ownership may be transferred in whole or in part by any means of conveyance or by operation of law.
• 17 U.S.C. § 412 — statutory damages and attorney’s fees are unavailable for infringement commenced before registration, save where registration follows within three months of first publication.
• 17 U.S.C. § 504 — (c)(1): statutory damages of not less than $750 or more than $30,000 for all infringements with respect to any one work; (c)(2): up to $150,000 where the infringement was committed wilfully.
• 17 U.S.C. § 1401 — (a)(2)(B)(iv): for a sound recording fixed before 15 February 1972 and first published from 1957 onward, the transition period ends 15 February 2067.
• Bridgeport Music, Inc. v. Dimension Films, 410 F.3d 792 (6th Cir. 2005) (PDF, the Berkman Klein Center’s abridgement of the opinion) — the two-second sample of a three-note guitar riff, lowered and looped to sixteen beats; the holding that a sound recording owner has the exclusive right to sample his own recording; “Get a license or do not sample”; that an artist is free to duplicate a riff in the studio; the court’s statement that the result is dictated by the statute. Read from the PDF, decoded locally.
• VMG Salsoul, LLC v. Ciccone, Nos. 13-57104 and 14-55837 (9th Cir., filed 2 June 2016) (PDF, the court’s opinion) — the 0.23-second horn segment; the de minimis test as whether the average audience would recognise the appropriation; the court’s stated creation of a circuit split with Bridgeport. Read from the PDF, decoded locally.
• US Copyright Office, Circular 56, Copyright Registration for Sound Recordings (PDF) — a derivative sound recording incorporates preexisting sounds; the material-excluded and new-material-included fields; the copyright in a sound recording does not cover the music, lyrics or other content embodied in it. Read from the PDF, decoded locally; no revision date is stated for it here.
• DistroKid, Uploading Music That Contains Sampling From Other Songs (updated 29 June 2026) — that DistroKid cannot approve the use of samples and stores do not allow another artist’s stem or sample without permission; royalty-free library and DAW sounds excepted; the definition of sampling against a cover.
• DistroKid, What is an Interpolation? Can I Use a Cover License to Upload One to DistroKid? (updated 29 June 2026) — an interpolation re-records a musical element into a new composition and uses no audio from the original; the cover licensing solution does not apply to it.
• DistroKid, How do I upload songs with licensed samples from Tracklib? (updated 29 June 2026) — the licensor is added to Splits at the percentage in the sample licence.
• TuneCore, Distributing Cover Songs, Remixes, Mixtapes, MashUps, Samples, or Interpolations (updated 19 September 2026) — a master use licence from the original recording’s owner for remixes, samples, interpolations and mashups; that nothing may be distributed without 100% of the rights to it.
• Tracklib Help, Will I need to share my songs revenue with the original sample rightsholders? (updated 27 May 2026) — the share is from both master and publishing revenue, sized by category and sample length; the original rightsholders go on the new song’s works registration.
• Tracklib Help, How do I clear a sample? (updated 19 September 2026) — licences at up to 2, 15 or 60 seconds; the licensee is the party responsible for releasing and accounting.
• CMRRA, FAQ — “I want to sample a recording and use it in my song. Do I have to pay?”: permission from the copyright owners of both the song and the recording.
• Music Week, Richard Ashcroft regains rights to Bitter Sweet Symphony (23 May 2019) — the four-second orchestral loop; Jagger and Richards added as co-writers and the royalties relinquished to the sample’s publisher in the original dispute; their 2019 decision to pass the credit and royalties back.
• Apple, Apple Music Style Guide — the Sampled Artist role, and that a sampled artist is not credited as featuring.
• Copyright Act (Canada), s. 3 — (1): copyright in a work is the sole right to produce or reproduce the work or any substantial part thereof in any material form.
• Copyright Act (Canada), s. 18 — (1): the maker’s sole right to publish, reproduce in any material form, and rent out the sound recording or any substantial part of it.
• Copyright Act (Canada), s. 29.21 — (1): non-commercial user-generated content, with its four conditions.
• Copyright Act (Canada), s. 38.1 — (1)(a): statutory damages of not less than $500 and not more than $20,000 per work for commercial infringement; (1)(b): $100 to $5,000 for all works where non-commercial.

Every page cited here was read on the date at the top of this piece. Two court opinions and one circular were read from PDFs through a local decoder rather than as text, and the piece says so beside each. Distributors’ pages change without notice; TuneCore’s was updated on the day it was read. This page describes United States and Canadian law and nothing else, no price is stated because none is published, and nothing here is legal advice — an owner’s letter about a released record is the case this page hands to counsel by name.

Keeping the register

Every section above ends at the same drawer: two owners, two licences, and the share the second one puts on your sheet. CatalogTracker keeps an agreement of any kind uploaded beside the track it governs, hashed, and flags it when the splits or a party changed after it was signed; a publishing split names a Party that may be an organisation, so a sampled song’s publisher holds its share on the new work’s sheet under its own name; and every change is in the history with its old value and its new one. In development for iPhone.