The gap between the people who make music and the people who distribute it is a gap of technical vocabulary. Ask any of the mid-level staff at a major distribution service to define a sample, and the answer will orbit somewhere near “a piece of a song.” Ask them what a song recorded on a Roland JD‑08 is, and you will get silence, then a shrug, then a request for “clearance documentation” for a track that has no cleared material in it because there is nothing to clear.

A sample is a piece of somebody else’s recording, lifted and dropped into your own — the drum break from an Amen record, four bars of a Fela horn line, a Whitney vocal ad‑lib pitched down. If you use one, you owe money to the person who made the original recording and, usually, to the person who wrote the underlying song.

Samples are fine. They have always been fine, provided the person using them pays the person who made the original recording. That is the line. Some of what I release does use samples, and every one of those is licensed and paid for. The problem is not sample use. The problem is a distribution industry that cannot tell a licensed sample from a synth patch from an uncleared clip — and treats all three the same way: guilty until you prove otherwise, and even then, held for weeks.

A song recorded on a Roland JD‑08 is a song recorded on a Roland JD‑08. The JD‑08 is a synthesizer. It generates the sound; nobody else recorded that sound; there is nothing to sample. The factory presets are Roland’s, and Roland sells the synth on the understanding that you use its presets to write music — that is what the box is for. Every synthesizer ever sold works this way. If a synth preset were a copyright‑cleared sample, no one from Prince to Skrillex would have released a note in the last forty years.

The distribution services don’t know this. Worse: they don’t need to know it, because they’ve built a business where you have to negotiate with them anyway, and if they hold your release for three weeks over a phantom clearance question, you have no recourse. That is the mechanism. Ignorance is the product.

What they do to your music without asking

Since I last released through the majors, the list has gotten longer:

• They change your name. The name I signed with is not the name that appears on the platform. Some services append ‑Topic or the label’s tag; some rename artists whose real name is “too similar” to another artist already in their database — first come, first named, and the second person is told to pick a new identity.
• They change your speed. Loudness normalization is universal now, but some services also apply “tempo smoothing” to tracks flagged as inconsistent. If your song is the inconsistency — a live take, a rubato passage, a deliberate rush — you don’t get to have it. It comes out flat.
• They change your song. Some services will trim silence, cross‑fade abrupt endings, or apply “clean‑up” mastering to a track that was mastered on purpose. The version listeners hear is not the version you delivered.
• They change the name you’re allowed to use. Trademark disputes, artist‑name collisions, and platform‑specific naming rules mean a name that was fine last year is a legal question this year. You have to rebrand, or the release doesn’t ship.
• They can pull it down without telling you. DMCA takedowns are automated; false positives are common; and the appeal process is slower than the release cycle.

This is why I have not put out a song through the distribution services in a long time.

The music on this site is the way I made it. The BPM is the BPM I chose. The title is the title I wrote. The name on the release is mine. If a track sounds like a JD‑08 patch, it is a JD‑08 patch, played by me on the actual synth, recorded on the day I played it. When a track does use a sample, that sample is licensed and paid for — the line is not hard to draw when you are willing to draw it. Nothing on this site has been cleaned up by an algorithm that thinks silence is a defect.

If any of that changes, it will change because I changed it. Not because someone in a support queue mis‑classified my recording as a sample of itself.

Listen to the music →