Can you legally sample a record, and what clearance costs

Yes, but only with permission, and you need it twice. A sampled record contains two copyrights with two different owners: the recording, usually held by a label, and the song, held by its writers and their publisher. Both have to agree, both can set their own price, and either can refuse for no reason at all. In the UK there is no length of sample short enough to skip this. Clearing one through an agent starts at a few hundred pounds in admin before the owners have asked for anything, which is why most bedroom producers either use a pre-cleared service such as Tracklib or replace the sample altogether.

We checked every figure below on 16 September 2026 against the business or court that published it. Clearance deals are private contracts, so the fees owners charge are never listed anywhere; the ranges here come from Sound On Sound and from Tracklib, both named, and should be read as the shape of a deal rather than a quote.

One sample needs two licences

The master use licence covers the sound recording, the actual audio you lifted. It comes from whoever owns that recording, which is normally the label that released it, sometimes the artist or producer. The publishing licence covers the composition inside the recording: the melody, chords and lyrics. It comes from the song's publisher, or from the writers themselves if they never signed one.

These are separate negotiations. PRS for Music's page on arranging and sampling works says you need permission from the rightsholders to use an excerpt of an existing piece of music, no matter how small the sample, and that the sound recording rights have to be cleared with the label in addition. A yes from one side is worth nothing without the other. The publisher can agree while the label refuses, and the reverse happens too.

PRS's works database is where you find out who publishes a song. The recording owner is usually the label credited on the original release, though catalogues are sold often enough that the name on a 1970s sleeve is rarely the company holding the rights today.

There is no safe number of seconds

The two-second rule, the four-bar rule and the idea that heavy processing makes a sample legal are all myths in UK law. Copyright is infringed by copying a substantial part of a work, and the courts judge substantial by quality as well as quantity. A single recognisable hook can be substantial on its own. PRS's own wording, no matter how small, is the practical position.

Pitching a sample down, chopping it or burying it in a mix changes how likely anyone is to notice. It does not change whether you needed permission. Tracklib's guide to music clearance makes the point producers tend to skip, that releasing a track for free does not protect it from a claim either.

What about the Kraftwerk pastiche ruling

This year produced the biggest sampling judgment in Europe for a generation, and it does not change much for a UK producer. On 14 April 2026 the Court of Justice of the European Union ruled in Pelham II (C-590/23) that sampling can fall under the EU's pastiche exception where the new work enters into a recognisable artistic dialogue with the original. The case concerns roughly two seconds of Kraftwerk's 1977 track Metall auf Metall, looped by Moses Pelham in 1997. On 3 September 2026 Germany's Federal Court of Justice dismissed Kraftwerk's appeal, according to Schalast, the firm that represented Pelham.

The UK has its own pastiche exception in section 30A of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, but it applies only to fair dealing, and an English court first tested it in Shazam Productions v Only Fools The Dining Experience in 2022, where the defence failed. Pelham II came after Brexit, and under section 6 of the European Union (Withdrawal) Act 2018 UK courts are not bound by CJEU decisions made after 31 December 2020, though they may have regard to them. We found no UK judgment applying pastiche to a music sample. Until one exists, it is a defence to argue in court after you have been sued, and no distributor or label will release a track on that basis.

What clearance actually costs

The bill has two parts, and people budget for the wrong one. The first is the clearance agent's fee for tracking down owners and negotiating. Sample Clearance Services, a UK company operating since 1997, quoted £375 plus VAT per clearance in its own Q&A, with a turnaround of three to four weeks and advice to allow at least three months before release. That Q&A is dated November 2020 and the company's current site lists no price, so treat £375 as a floor. A sample needing both a master and a publishing clearance can be charged as two.

The second part is what the owners want, which the agent's fee does not include. Sound On Sound's sample clearance guide puts the master side at an advance, running to thousands of pounds for a major artist, plus a royalty of roughly 1% to 5% on every record sold. On the publishing side it says publishers may ask for 50% to 100% of the publishing income from your new song. Tracklib's clearance guide gives a broader figure of a few hundred to a few thousand dollars for most samples.

How badly a publishing split can go

The Verve's Bitter Sweet Symphony is the example everyone cites, and the detail matters. NME's 2019 account says the band sampled four seconds of an orchestral recording of the Rolling Stones' The Last Time, made by Andrew Loog Oldham, and had permission from Decca Records for the recording. Allen Klein's company ABKCO, which held the publishing, argued the song had not been cleared on the composition side. Richard Ashcroft lost his songwriting credit and royalties, and NME reports he received $1,000 from a song that earned around $5 million in publishing.

In April 2019 Mick Jagger and Keith Richards agreed to hand the credit and the royalties back, more than twenty years later. The lesson for anyone sampling is the part that went wrong first: the master was licensed and the publishing was not, and the owner of the half that was missing named the price.

The pre-cleared route: Tracklib

Tracklib turns the usual order round. Its catalogue of commercially released records has been cleared with the owners in advance, and instead of an upfront fee you register a revenue share when you release. Tracklib's comparison page, dated January 2025, lists Premium at $14.99 and Max at $19.99 a month with the clearance fee included, and puts the split at usually 10% to 20%. It used to charge a $50 clearance fee per licence on top; the cheaper Lite plan still does not include fee-free clearance.

The catch is the catalogue. Tracklib only covers records whose owners signed up, so the famous break you actually want is often missing. Our comparison of Splice, Loopcloud and Tracklib covers what the subscription includes and what happens to a licence if you cancel.

Or avoid clearing anything

Royalty-free libraries need no clearance at all, because the licence comes with the download. Splice and Loopcloud both work this way, and a loop from either can go straight into a commercial release. The trade-off is that the same sound is available to everyone else, which our piece on whether sample packs count as real producing takes on directly.

Replaying the part yourself, known as an interpolation, removes the master licence because you now own the recording. It does not remove the publishing licence. PRS advises getting permission for anything that uses somebody else's work, including making something sound similar, so a replayed hook still needs the publisher's agreement and usually a publishing share.

How to clear a sample yourself

• Identify the publisher through PRS's works database and the current owner of the recording, which may no longer be the label on the original sleeve.
• Send both a short request with the sample, the exact seconds used, how it sits in your track, and where you plan to release. Include a rough bounce, because owners refuse vague requests.
• Expect to be asked for an advance and a royalty on the master and a percentage of your song on the publishing. Get both answers in writing before you distribute anything.
• Allow three months. Sample Clearance Services advises that much even with an agent working on it, and a release date booked with your distributor before clearance lands is the most common way to end up pulling a track.
• If either owner says no or does not reply, the answer is no. Silence is not permission.