Timbaland steals a lot of samples

Check out this song Courtship Dating by the Toronto band, Crystal Castles, which has been getting critics excited this year. They use sounds from old 8-bit nintendo games, and give it an electro bounce and really spooky, grating vocals. It's really good-

Penguin Swimming Hole wrote,

Courtship Dating”...could be the beat to next year’s number one hip-hop song

Actually, Timbland is way ahead of her- he already sampled it last year. Check this out.

Looking into it, this isn't the first time he's done it, either. I discovered that one myself, but check these out from youtube-

Sampling an artist that works with video game sounds, like Crystal Castles-


Sampling Arabian music-


What I've heard is that he's very lazy about clearing his samples. He just steals the pieces of music and puts the tracks out, and if anyone complains, he lets them settle it with the label's legal department. It probably costs him more to do it this way than it would be to just get permission in the first place, but he earns so much he doesn't care.

People into the video game culture are outraged, but actually, this is pretty par for the course for hip hop, which builds almost every thing out of samples. The difference being, most producers stick to sampling soul records, James Brown or Parliament. Timbaland samples some really out there stuff. Its one thing to be James Brown, who already had a deal and a name, and have to deal with this stuff via lawyers. An aggravation, but you have the team to deal with it and see you get paid. But if you're just a guy doing music as a hobby, it must feel like a punch in the stomach to hear someone stealing your music and making half a million dollars off it.

Edit: just found a comment by someone who talked to Ethan Kath of Crystal Castles, who says that the Timbaland isn't a sample, but appears to be a re-creation of the riff using the same SIDstation synthesizer:

I spoke to Ethan about it and he said that neither one is sample.
He said it sounded to him like Timbaland listened to the CCs song and wanted to imitate that sort of sound.

Ethan uses a sample of ETHAN playing a SIDstation on his track.
Timbaland probably used a SIDstation to create the similar sound on his track.

(from Gameboy Genius)