42 Popular Songs And Their Original Samples

Some of these I can't even imagine how they managed to find the song they sampled.

Nobody: Pop musicians: Hippity hoppity your song is my property

"The more we change, the more things stay the same."

"Everything is a copy of a copy of a copy" - A wise man

You know you're getting old when the originals were hit songs when you were growing up!

Everyone out here arguing about plagiarism and rip offs and I'm just here using this video to add songs to my mixtape

fun fact, Suzanne Vega - Tom's Diner was the first MP3 ever created. It was the test track used by Karl Heinz-Brandenburg to assess the compression of the MP3 codec he was creating. As an acapella song which was loved by audiophiles for testing speaker setups he knew it would be an ultimate test of quality.

I’d love to know how many of these artists just found an old song and thought “yeah that sounds good” and how many had genuine respect and love for the song and wanted to express it.

I’ve never heard Madonna’s song, when I heard the beat I thought it was ABBA

Samples 101 Sampling means that you include a previous recording in your own recording. For example, you loop the first ten seconds of a track and rap over it. You did not perform that part of the track that is looped. Interpolation is when you include part of the melody and/or the words of another song, but you perform it yourself and use it to create a different song. For example, you sing a vocal melody that is identical to another one from another song. You performed that part yourself, but you didn't write it. The key is "is this similar, or did they literally took the song, spliced part of it and used it?" Interpolation can be a grey area: is your song similar enough to the other one? That's why plagiarism cases are always about interpolation, and sometimes it's up to court to determine if it's similar enough that the writers of the original can get songwriting royalties from it. Sampling is black or white. Did you use the recording on your own song? If so, the songwriters and the performers of the track are usually entitled to compensation. That's roughly it!

7:58 how did Pitbull manage that? Literally the most famous guitar riff of the 2000s

It's amazing how far back some sampling chains can go. The standout track from Beats and Styles' 2003 album was Dynamite, which sampled a guitar riff from Punjabi MC's 1998 banghra hit Mundian to Bach Ke. The bass line from that song comes from Busta Rhymes' remix of one of his own songs, released as Turn it Up/Fire it Up the same year. That famously sampled the iconic theme tune from hit 80s TV show Knight Rider by Stu Phillips, but great as it is, Phillips' theme tune classic is itself cobbled together from several sources. It's insistent bassline comes from Harry Thurmann's 1982 track Sphinx. Knight Rider's synth melody, however, comes from a little fanfare that introduces Paul Whiteman's 1923 recording of the popular ditty Parade of the Wooden Soldiers. Even that, however, was not the origin... for Whiteman borrowed his fanfare from the opening theme of a march the French composer Leo Delibes wrote for his 1876 ballet Sylvia.

Are we going to just glance over how fallen kingdom sounds exactly like viva la vida?

It’s actually the best part on most of the songs

I didn't expect a lot of these riffs to sound better in the original, I'll have to have a listen to some more oldies!

My favorite sample of a song is A Tribe Called Quest's "Can I Kick It?". It samples Lou Reed's "Walk on the Wild Side"

When Liam Payne samples Shaggy who sampled War. Sampleception

“Pitbull - feel this moment” sampled on “aha - take on me”

4:37 CHOOORANDO SE FOI, QUEM UM DIA JÁ ME FEZ CHORAAAR