Sampling was instrumental in the rise of electronic music and is one of the most fundamental techniques in production today. It is also still a massive legal grey area. Jungle and hip-hop are unlikely to exist had artists not "stolen" samples off old funk, jazz and soul records and yet still producers today are taken to court for using very short samples off very obscure tracks to create a piece of music completely different to the original. Weird, huh.

The recent increase in people sharing their samples has been just incredible - I've really enjoyed listening to (and then sonically destroying) the various bits and pieces uploaded here.

However, unfortunately its led to some controversy recently and I have seen some confusion over the rules, so I wanted to make this post to clarify them and remind you about reddit's user agreement.

Discussing sampling and sharing samples is not only allowed, but encouraged!

We all love making music and we all love helping others make music.

Having said that, distributing samples you do not own the rights to is a very clear copyright violation and therefore not allowed.

This is not a subreddit-exclusive rule but in fact applies to all of reddit.

I really hope everyone continues to share all the great sounds and noises they create and that we can be sensible enough to keep it free of copyrited material. As always, if you see anything that you think might be breaking our subreddits rules or reddits ToS, please hit that report button.

Creatively yours

• JSE and the edmprod mods