Vemund Hegstad Alm

• Alm, Vemund Hegstad (2025). Negotiating Labor and Creativity on Sample Platforms. Full text in Research Archive Show summary

  For creators seeking sounds or music sequences for their next song, a sample platform like Splice—with millions of royalty-free and sounds designed for music production—may be the obvious choice. While previous research has concentrated on how users navigate these platforms, this presentation shifts the focus to the producers who create content for Splice. Specifically, it investigates how their creative processes are influenced by "platform effects". Through qualitative interviews with sample makers on Splice, we explore the negotiation of platform affordances, labor dynamics, and the balance between creativity and commercial demands. Ultimately arguing that sample makers navigate a complex web of optimization strategies to meet the platform’s demands.

• Alm, Vemund Hegstad & Brøvig, Ragnhild (2025). The Decline of Cloud-Based Sample Platforms? Full text in Research Archive
• Alm, Vemund Hegstad & Brøvig, Ragnhild (2025). The emergence and potential decline of cloud-based sample platforms. Full text in Research Archive Show summary

  This presentation explores the emergence of cloud-based sample platforms like Splice and Loopcloud and consider their potential decline in the age of AI-generated music. Sabrina Carpenter’s hit single “Espresso,” released on April 11th, 2024, put the spotlight on the ubiquitous use of online sample platforms in popular music. The songs’ main intrumental elements-guitars and drums-stem from two loops of producer Oliver’s popular pack “Power Tools Sample Pack III” on the sample platform Splice. This caused a surge of social media posts demonstrating how the instrumental track could be recreated in little under a minute. This form of sampling—both cheap and legal, fast and convenient—represents a distinctly different take on sampling than that commonly associated with “golden age hip hopproductions”, where samples are extracted from existing recordings (Brøvig 2023; McLeod and Dicola 2011; Schloss 2004). Besides being more efficient, these sample platforms’ royalty-free models allow producers to use samples freely without fear of legal action. Our presentation will begin by examining the factors leading to the emergence of cloudbased sample platforms. While the legal aspects might have contributed to the development of sampling platforms, we will also trace the platforms’ rootedness in less explored areas ranging from “library music,” to synthesizer preset cassettes and sample CDs bundled with music tech magazines (Cameron 2020). We will then discuss how these platforms, partly due to their mitigation of copyright issues, have contributed to transforming the sampling practices and aesthetics established by early hip-hop productions while also encouraging other forms of practices (Arrieta 2021). Lastly, we will discuss whether the advent of AIgenerated music technology has the potential to disrupt the sample industry altogether. This work will draw on research on sampling, copyright and musical platforms, and include insights gained from our interviews with producers of sample packs.

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