Label executives, in turn, say their artists often don’t inform them when they’ve borrowed from other works.Ĭlinton has accused Bridgeport of stealing his fortune and he is bent on recovering whatever money he can.īut his best chance may have passed.

And the company said there isn’t that much money to fight over-Bridgeport said it has collected only about $4 million for Clinton songs, including recent court settlements, because record labels have copied snippets without paying. Lawyers dueling over the songs say the true figure could hit $20 million or more.īut Bridgeport Music, the Detroit company that administers licensing of the songs, says it doesn’t owe Clinton a nickel. Use of his work in hundreds of rap and R&B songs since the late ‘80s easily could have meant $10 million for him, they say, if every performer who lifted a piece of his songs had paid and if the catalog had generated money at the same rate as those of other heavily-sampled artists. Record executives speculate that Clinton’s songs should have generated the record industry’s biggest sampling fortune. And it has provided a new source of cash for the publishing divisions of the major record conglomerates. Sampling also has generated new fortunes for such acts as the late Curtis Mayfield and writer-producers Nile Rodgers and the late Bernard Edwards. The Isley Brothers, who have had more than 410 requests for permission to sample their catalog, last year closed an estimated $15-million deal to issue bonds backed by their future royalties. Rap has made Clinton perhaps the most-sampled artist on the planet-a lucrative distinction at a time black music is so popular that it’s becoming a Wall Street commodity.

Funk, as Clinton says, became “the DNA of hip-hop,” as rap artists began lifting snippets of his songs to form the musical background behind their rhymes.

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