When listening to recent chart music, an unsettling feeling may creep through the soundwaves: deja-vu. What you’re noticing is a huge increase in the number of songs making use of sampling. Sampling is the practice of taking audio from existing songs and repurposing them for new music.
While sampling is not new, the frequency and blatantness of its use has skyrocketed in recent years, with many hits shamelessly lifting elements or entire choruses from existing songs;, David Guetta’s ‘I’m Good (Blue)’, Nicki Minaj's ‘Super Freaky Girl’, Doja Cat’s ‘Paint The Town Red’ and Jack Harlow’s last two number ones are just a few examples.
Even Miley Cyrus’s Grammy award-winning ‘Flowers’, while not a direct sample, interpolates Bruno Mars’ When I Was Your Man’ and Gloria Gaynor’s ‘I Will Survive’. But what has caused this fixation with repackaging older hits? Music critics will offer a million think pieces, but arguing that artists have simply ‘ran out of ideas’ and music is ‘just worse now’ is even lazier than the sampling in question.
A more satisfying explanation lies in the shifting structures of the music industry, where avenues for discovery and consumption are entirely different than even a decade ago. TikTok, now the most essential generator of hits, is an app centred around finding new uses for existing sounds. Combined with streaming, which makes all music instantly accessible, hits can now emerge from any point in history. Just look at Fleetwood Mac’s ‘Dreams’ re-entering charts in 2020, or Taylor Swift’s 2019 non-single ‘Cruel Summer’ hitting number one in 2023. The definition of ‘modern’ hits is becoming increasingly fluid, with a greater focus on mining and recontextualising music of the past to create charts of the present, surely inspiring similar interest in sampling.
This coincides with the death of monoculture, which entails the idea that, with the rise of social media and streaming, entertainment has become infinitely more niche. When most people consumed the radio and performances on a handful of TV channels, we had definite hits and stars. Now, there is simply so much content and such ease of access that people begin to listen to their own unique selection of music while culturally saturating hits more and more; the ‘Call Me Maybe’’s and ‘Uptown Funk’’s that will be played at weddings until the end of time, seemingly become extinct.
It’s become difficult for songs to seep into the public consciousness: if you don’t really want to listen to something you rarely have to. I don’t know anyone my age who listens to the radio in the car, and background music in shops is drowned out by personal song choices blaring through headphones.
As people dictate their own listening, songs that anyone can sing along to become rare as hits are confined to niche audiences. Consider the ‘would your mum know it?’ factor as songs like ‘Boys A Liar Pt.2’ or ‘Die For You’ are technically hits, yet I doubt my parents have ever heard them. Similarly, I was convinced that everyone knew Kylie Minogue’s ‘Padam Padam’ or Troye Sivan’s ‘Rush’ (turns out I just inhabit an extraordinarily gay area of the TikTok algorithm.)
Even hits are often recognised only for 20 seconds after being featured in TikToks, resulting in painfully silent clubs for the other verses. This means it’s almost impossible to achieve truly ubiquitous hits without some external push like a viral sped-up remix, TikTok trend or attachment to a huge cultural moment, be that an artist’s immense existing fame, or from a popular film and TV show. It’s no coincidence that many of the only real hits of 2023 originate from the Barbie or Saltburn soundtrack.
It’s a phenomenon not confined to music as almost all of the 2023 box office successes were sequels and remakes, or tethered to some kind of existing brand*.* Therefore, increased sampling can largely be explained as a tactic of wielding existing associations from a time of smash hits, to draw attention to new songs in a much more diluted musical landscape (the Bruno Mars connection certainly achieved this for ‘Flowers’). After a few successful examples, it doesn’t take long for this technique to become a self-sustaining trend.
This doesn’t necessarily mean the death of originality though. The music industry is at a turning point, figuring out how to generate culturally dominating hits without shared cultural mediums to find them. If this entails an intermediate phase largely defined by reinterpreting existing songs, that's understandable. Sampling can create genuinely interesting and fun songs, and there’s still lots of original music out there (often found on the deep cuts of albums whose lead singles feature samples out of necessity). Issues arise if we decide that this is the end point for truly groundbreaking music as though we can now only miserably reinterpret the greats. But like 2010’s EDM or 2000’s pop punk, sampling will hopefully fade away into the memory of a phase we will look back on, maybe even fondly, once it’s over.
