"Hip-hop turns 50 this year. Institutions that once ignored the genre are getting in on the celebration... But the way hip-hop makes music remains completely unprotected by law. Over the past four decades, even as hip-hop’s method of sonic collage became a basic mode of music making across genres, the legal conception of what music is, and what constitutes authorship, remains rooted in our pre-digital past. As we move into the second half of the hip-hop century, it’s high time to change that" - music writer Dan Charnas insists in Slate's piece about sampling. "The landscape is far too precarious for creators, and so we need two things: a clearer, broader conception of fair use and, for everything else, an expanded compulsory license law, which would ideally clear up that gray area, creating rules for engagement that avoid legal wrangling, ensuring owners’ rights and income without stifling new creativity."

An interesting story in the Tracklib about members of a Discord community by the name of Sample Hunting, who have developed a new model of sample discovery, even the shortest samples. The new method includes Google Assistant which can even detect samples less than a second long, and is usually able to detect samples that have been chopped or time-stretched. Tracklib is a crate-digging platform to sample and clear original music.

"Fundamentally WhoSampled is a music discovery service... The idea being that, if you came to the site and you’re a fan of say, Michael Jackson, for example, you’re only a few steps away from discovering Quincy Jones and then hip-hop records that sampled Quincy Jones" - WhoSampled's Chris Read says in Berklee Online interview. WhoSampled is the leading destination for sample-based music, covers, and remixes, housing the world’s most comprehensive database of music with more than 730,000 samples spanning more than 1,000 years.

"An exhaustive, highly informative, and impossible-to-put-down" - PopMatters says in a review of a book about the "strange, mysterious, obscure" album 'Ghetto: Misfortune's Wealth' by the 1970s R&B and funk band 24-Carat Black. It chronicles the unfortunate fates of its many members and the delayed praise that it would eventually gain, as a sample-vault for many stars, including Jay-Z, Kanye West, and Kendrick Lamar.

There are hundreds and thousands of great samples, really hard to pick out the best, but NME tried nevertheless. It's a good choice, although it's hardly definite. So, the top three: Destiny’s Child turning the Stevie Nicks' guitar riff ‘Edge of Seventeen’ into a R&B belter ‘Bootylicious’; A Tribe Called Quest use of Lou Reed’s lilting instrumentals into creating the legendary call-and-response led ‘Can I Kick It?’; ABBA’s 'Gimme Gimme Gimme' was pure pop before Madonna used it to make yet another disco banger, ‘Hung Up’.

Citizen DJ is an open-source hip-hop sample tool launched by the US The Library of Congress, where users will have access to a massive audio collection that dates back over a hundred years. A preview is currently available, and the full service will launch this summer. There will be three ways to access these sound files: an interface for searching by sound and metadata; a simple music-creation app that easily allows the collection to be remixed with hip-hop beats; and various “sample packs” full of thousands of clips from particular collections. It is LOC's Brain Foo’s intention to bring back the golden age of hip-hop sampling, but Citizen DJ will be available for use in other musical genres.