Damn Drake...Again??

Was Knocking Off Pet Shop Boys Worth It?

Empowering fierce female founders to leverage the power of licensing to achieve explosive growth!

Fame is a strange animal. Stars and celebrities enjoy the adulation of fans and great tables at restaurants. They vacation in exotic locales and reside in overstuffed mansions. But there are temptations as well. For the rapper Drake, one of those temptations seems to be deploying uncleared interpolations and samples in his music. His new song, “All The Parties,” contains arguably the most important lyric from the Pet Shop Boys’ 1981 hit, “West End Girls.” The duo were not amused.

This is not the first time that Drake has opted for possible contrition over necessary permission. He asked Halle Berry if he could use her photo for cover art. She said no and he used it anyway. Baltimore rapper Rye Rye called out Drake on X (Twitter) when she heard her vocals on another Drake track, “Calling For You.”

The Supreme Court has set a sliding scale for fair use safe harbor vis-a-vis the value of samples. It operates on the importance of the sample in the musical structure and integrity of the original song. The more prominent and important the interpolated or sampled material is in the original composition, the less likely fair use can be claimed by the “thief,” thus requiring appropriate compensation and credit to the original artist.

Active ownership of creative work begins and ends with rich metadata. You’re more likely to be paid the royalties you’re due and you’re less likely to fall victim to entitled performers like Drake. Songwriter turned music executive Tami LaTrell offers an excellent summary of why it is so important for artists to get as much information about their compositions and recordings as possible into industry databases.

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“For every song, there's two copyrights. One is called the sound recording (also known as the master) and the other copyright is called the composition. The sound recording consists of the song audio that we hear on streaming, radio, television, internet and is in most cases owned by the record label. The composition is the actual production of the song, and is owned by the producer “(who produces or "composes" the music) and the songwriter (who writes or "composes" the lyrics). A basic example of ownership totals 100% (per each copyright) which means that if there are only two owners on one copyright, it would be a 50/50 share.”

Anytime a third party wants to use any part of an original song that they do not own, they have to request permission from all owners of the master and the owner of the composition. As far as the payments, the license fee must be paid by the party requesting to use the sample on each side of the copyrights.” Those fees can be mere thousands. Where many artists get tripped up, however, is in the length of time that it takes for the authorization to be granted. Some clearances take as little as 2 months, others as long as 8 months. If time is of the essence, an arbitrary timeline that delay a project by nearly a year may seem untenable.

However, as the saying goes…time or money. When it comes to your art and the career that art can provide, it pays to do paperwork, no matter how long it might take. Of course, like a good lawyer (and not a very good artist), I must also ask…can’t you find another song to sample where the clearance turnaround is faster?? I mean, damn Drake.

Is it better to ask for forgiveness or permission?  Well, if the battle between Drake and [fill in the blank] on any given day is any indication, it’s gonna start getting expensive to ask for forgiveness (again and again).

While licensing fees can range in the thousands (the “permission” part), without proper clearance, artists like Drake can face millions in damages (the “forgiveness” part). But with Drake constantly opting for forgiveness, sometimes you just wanna say “honestly, nevermind”…just pay your damn money, I guess.

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