Samplify

Michael Jackson, genius of influence and genius influenced. Or how has sampling become a creative tool within the music industry?

This study looks at the effects of sampling on artist proximity in Spotify®’s Fans Like It Too® algorithm, generating listening diversity. In music, sampling is the process of taking existing audio extracts and transforming them to produce new music.

This analysis focuses on a benchmark artist, influenced and influential, Michael Jackson, whose cultural heritage is aligned with African-American culture, which is the source of the genres most affected by the practice of sampling. It is based on the database of the WhoSampled website, which lists almost a million samples, remixes and covers submitted by a community of users.

Since its birth is at the origin of the emergence of a musical genre, sampling has created genre-wide diversity in music. By properly crediting sampled music, it’s possible to generate relationships of proximity from artist to artist, leading to a form of diversity in listening.

Indeed, sampled music and the music containing the sample are not necessarily of the same genre (intra-genre and inter-genre sampling), era, country… and create a varied musical landscape.

With the emphasis on various musical genres, two types of data representation emerge from this study. The first shows the ratio between the music sampled by Michael Jackson (his influences) and the music he created (his discography). The second representation model, used for six datavisualizations, illustrates the artist’s influence on the music scene, from one of his songs to those that sampled it.

Michael Jackson was influenced by other artists in his career, but did not make sampling the major driving force behind the production of his tracks. When he did use samples, however, he often did so intra-genre, which is not a driver of great musical diversity. On the other hand, he considerably influenced a large number of other artists, with 2128 samples referenced on Whosampled® over his entire solo career, 453 for The Jackson Five, and 253 for The Jacksons. A variety of genres can be observed (inter-genre samples), with the notable presence of Hip-Hop/Rap/R&B in the new sounds produced, which makes sense given the origins of sampling. Michael Jackson’s discography is thus a proven matrix of musical diversity.