Do Songs Become More Popular After Being Sampled?

Ever since star-studded copyright infringement cases in the early 1990s concluded that the process of music sampling did not constitute ‘fair use’ of intellectual property, high licensing costs have made the process prohibitively expensive. Employing streaming service data, this paper reevaluates the traditional ineligibility of the fair use doctrine by presenting empirical evidence of music sampling’s effect on the popularity of sampled songs on Spotify over the period 2016-2022. It then examines for which levels ofpre-sampling popularity this effect is strongest, as well as the effect of genre and the relationship between the genres of the sampled and sampling song. We find that sampled songs are added to playlists at a 20-40% higher rate for a seven week period afterbeing repurposed within popular songs. Furthermore, original works see greater in-creases in the rate of playlist addition when there is more scope for sampling to act as informative advertising : when sampled songs were already well known, or had genre characteristics that imply listener familiarity (such as being repurposed in a song of the same genre), our primary findings diminished or disappeared entirely.