In fairness, the vast majority of tracks that use the amen break aren't going to make "millions". It started out as a few underground records that would have a relatively limited distribution. There was a lot of sampling that went on and nobody really thought anything of it because people weren't making large sums of money from it. In fact underground artists would often sample each other too and nobody minded. The problem was the amen break got sampled and almost nobody knew where it came from. It then got resampled and resampled, it was sampled so often that it started to appear on sample disks as if it were public domain. It's only relatively recently that it's become public knowledge. Heck, I'd been producing music for years before I realised and probably used that sample myself. The Winstons would have had no way to know they were being sampled either because of how niche that music scene was (and to some extent still is). So by the time the industry was big enough that artists were making a killing from that sample, it was already out there and everywhere.

I'm not saying it's fair but its far from the only sample to have been used everywhere with little recognition and sampling was one of the pivotal revolutions that gave the rise electronic music.

I wonder if there's more to this story than meets the eye. The author claims a label offered to buy the masters by 1996. So there probably was money in the licensing of the sampling (or at least the risk of being sued, and the label was trying to cover its ass).

I don't know the arrangement between the bandleader and the drummer (maybe the drummer was paid by session and was owed no royalties), but, in my understanding, the owner of the copyright definitely was entitled of royalties. In the early days it was chaos but by the 1990s samples were definitely being cleared.

After 1996, when the author found out about the sample, it was used (According to WhoSampled) by Oasis, Skrillex, Prodigy, Dua Lipa, Lupe Fiasco, Skipknot, and in the Naruto soundtrack. There definitely was the possibility of the author collecting royalties from some of those from copyright lawsuits.

On the other hand I remember in various communities since the early 2000s people asking "how do I clear the Amen Sample?", but nobody exactly knew who to contact because nobody seems to know who owns Metromedia Records, who put the original album.

I remember articles and interviews about this from 15+ years ago, so it's weird how no lawyer got in touch with the song author, or how the song author never got a lawyer.

On top of that, Amen Brother seems to contain portions of I'm a Winner and Theme From Lillies of the Field by The Impressions, so maybe that's why Spencer (the bandleader) never got any money to begin with.

I guess we won't know now that both the drummer and the author of the song are dead.

> and most of the artists sampling it would have taken that sample from other electronic artists rather than from the original Winstons vinyl

It was already popular in hip hop several years before it became popular in the underground electronic scene. It was used by Salt-n-Pepa in 1986, and by NWA, Ghetto Boys, 2 Live Crew and Ultramagnetic MCs in 1988. Even Janet Jackson used it in 1990. Heck, Informer by Snow used it! And those are the ones we know. Hardly underground.

In hip hop it was most certainly taken from the vinyl, as samplers with the required storage were still quite pricy at the time, not to mention most producers were doing their own sampling. The track name was probably passed from DJ to DJ.

The Amen craze in Electronic music only started in the early 90s. There was already some break beats in the last years of the 80s, but it was mostly Funky Drummer. It was around 90/91 when electronic musicians started doing it, from Atari Teenage Riot to Carl Cox, but it was already a thing in hip hop.

> The Creator app he runs on the Atari ST is a MIDI sequencer, not a DAW.

I didn't say it was a DAW. I assumed it was a tracker but didn't really look that closely at it.

> The machine is probably not fast enough for realtime sampling.

By the late 80s it was. There were definitely DAWs available for the ST. But Amiga was definitely the king for home sampling.

> For sampling he is very well known for having used a pair of Akai S950s, each with 2.25MB of RAM. You can see them both on the rack behind him with the round yellow stickers. Just in case: this specific model also came out after most of the recording I mentioned.

Well as you later go on to say, Rockefeller Skank was quite a bit later. But both the ST and Amiga were used for sampling. In fact coincidentally there's a discussion on the HN home page right now about doing exactly (re: Trackers). Lots of videos on Youtube of Amiga samplers too.

> Anyway, I was talking about 1986 and 1988... Rockefeller Skank was released in 1998.

Various models of Atari and Amiga were already out and available in the mid-80s and I very much doubt Norman Cook bought his ST new in 1995 to record Rockefeller Skank. But I do take your point that on this specific occasion he wasn't using the ST for sampling and nor was the ST powerful enough when it first hit the market. I believe the Amiga was. Also plenty of hardware sported floppy disk drives too (like the aforementioned Akai S950s). So my point about producers sharing sample disks still stands.

I guess this is a futile discussion though because we'll never really know who sampled Amen, Brother and who borrowed the sample of their mates.

> Either way, it is quite clear that he also samples from vinyl, like I said.

Loads of people sampled from vinyl. I've even done that. I wasn't arguing that didn't happen. All I was saying that there was also a lot of sample swapping going on and given the prevalence of the Amen break I'd wager a lot of producers had the sample included with a percussion set without knowing its origin. I mean it's included in the Hammerhead program exactly like that! I've got stacks of disks floating about of percussion I didn't directly rip.

> Anyway, I don't see how this is relevant to the topic. My point is that the sample was well known and was used in mainstream hip-hop from the beginning, it was never only an "underground secret distributed in disks"... that happened much later than the usage in hip-hop.

It's relevant because I'm saying that I think it was less well known than you claim. I think it appears more well known now because the history of the Amen break is more widely known (the kind of cognitive bias where we think things that we recently learn then seem like obvious facts that we always knew).

You might be right to be honest and it might be my memory of the era that is flawed. :/ However if that is the case then I find it weird that the sample wouldn't have been cleared by their big hip-hop labels and that the Winstons were aware of it's use but nobody cared enough to do anything about it until 10 or 20 years later when it was too late.

To answer your edit:

> However if that is the case then I find it weird that the sample wouldn't have been cleared by their big hip-hop labels and that the Winstons were aware of it's use but nobody cared enough to do anything about it until 10 or 20 years later when it was too late

The Winstons leader claims he only found out around 1996. The question is, why didn't he seek royalties from people who used it afterwards, like Oasis, Norman Cook, Dua Lipa, Naruto soundtrack, etc?

My guess is that the track is in a bit of copyright limbo, because it's basically a cover of two Impressions songs. Another one is that the recording company owns the masters. They seems to have been bought by MGM.