Music Licensing Comes Late to the Mash-Up Party

ByABC News
April 23, 2007, 7:09 AM

April 23, 2007 — -- Rock 'n' roll has always been about rebellion. And rebellion sells.

The music industry is well aware of this and has struggled mightily to co-opt most of the hot, countercultural phenomena that bubble up. Record labels now leak their own singles into file-sharing networks and systematically sign nominally indie bands to lucrative deals.

So how do musicians rebel when rebellion itself is a commodity?

A DJ known as Girl Talk is showing us how. Girl Talk (real name: Greg Gillis) has put together an album of "mash-ups" that has taken the world by storm.

To make a mash-up, a DJ splices together the vocal a cappella track from one song over the instrumental track from another. Girl Talk mixes audio tracks from dozens of songs, using artists from the Beatles to Beyonce, in the course of a single song. He has remixed songs for Beck and is opening for him at various European concert dates.

"Initially there's a lot of novelty appeal," Gillis said, on his way back home from his day job as an engineer. "I'm not a music theorist, but it's amazing how many songs are in the same key. A Kansas song will fit over a Chris Brown beat, and it'll sound perfect."

"It's a very punk style," Gillis said. "All of a sudden you can be manipulating these celebrities doing whatever you want."

Though mash-ups may be the ultimate media age statement, the concept is nothing new. As Gillis pointed out, mash-ups, sampling and rock itself all occupy different points on the spectrum of musical borrowing.

As early as the '70s, hip-hop DJs like Grandmaster Flash mixed together hip-hop and house tracks in clubs. In the '90s, aided by technology and a burgeoning DJ scene, especially in the United Kingdom, DJs like Coldcut and DJ Shadow brought mash-ups into the future with full-length studio albums involving heavily sampling and remixing. These albums put Diddy's chart-topping, sample-based singles to shame in terms of sheer complexity.