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WhoSampled to present first ever Samplethon at The Great Escape

By | Published on Tuesday 15 April 2014

WhoSampled

More details are now available about an exciting event taking place next month as part of Blueprint, the new mini-conference within The Great Escape focused on how the music, creative and tech communities can better work together to create exciting new products, services and content. And that event is the first ever Samplethon.

It’s being staged by WhoSampled, the world’s largest database documenting sampled music, in association with music publisher Boosey & Hawkes, and will bring together tech innovators, rights owners and music producers to create some great new tracks, right at the heart of the Blueprint conference.

As WhoSampled’s James Hamlin explains in an interview with CMU Business Editor and Great Escape Convention Programmer Chris Cooke: “The idea came from the success of the various hackathons that take place around the world, where APIs are provided by tech businesses to armies of developers for them to create interesting new projects”.

He goes on: “We wanted to create ‘a hackathon for music’ – that is to say for music creators, not music tech developers – and thought that applying this to sampling would be the perfect fit, by providing a bridge between the music rights holders and the producers, and allowing access to pre-cleared music, just like APIs. The removal of any legal shackles from sample-based music unlocks its creativity and holds the potential to add substantial new value to both the producers as well as the rights holders”.

Explaining what material the producers will be able to utilise, Hamilin adds: “The source material is provided by the famous music library of world reknowned publisher Boosey & Hawkes. This library material is an untapped goldmine of incredible sample material recorded by world class musicians, typically from the 60s through to the early 80s. The material being offered on the day was curated from the thousands of available tracks in the library during a lengthy digging session at the physical Boosey & Hawkes underground archive of vinyl records, buried underneath central London”.

Read the full interview here.

Blueprint and the Samplethon take place on Saturday 10 May at the Old Ship Hotel in Brighton. The event is open to all Great Escape delegates, plus standalone tickets are available for the mini-conference for just £30.



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