Would it be easier to cover who ISN’T making sample packs? Now Sandy Rivera joins the bandwagon…

Life used to be simple if you were in the dance music business. The majority of people either played music or made music – a few David Morales or Todd Terry types did both, but they largely did one or the other. And it worked – it was possible to make good money from doing either one, with little need to do anything else. How times have changed!

Nowadays, if you make music, you pretty much have to play it too. And not just that – you’ve got to know how to promote it, where to promote it and how to extract every possible penny out of it in an industry that’s perfectly content to see you getting ripped off. One way of making some extra money on the side now, of course, is sample packs.

This is nothing new – sample CDs have existed since the 1990s. Most of them were completely illegal, filled with copyrighted sounds and clips and are now as rare as hen’s teeth. In its place is an industry of copyright free sample packs which anyone can drag and drop into their own productions – hence if you’ve ever wondered why so much stuff sounds the same now, it’s because producers are often using the same source materials.

The latest to join the bandwagon is Sandy Rivera – who, to bring out our inner Troy McClure, “you might remember him from moments like Kings Of Tomorrow’s ‘Finally'” – whose new pack is out via Cr2 Records. You have a choice of either buying this pack for around €35 or paying a subscription which gives you access to the whole Cr2 sample library for £49.99 pe year.

No doubt Rivera will have been handsomely paid for his work – industry sources recently told Ears To The House that the cost of hiring someone to make sample packs is rising. Reasons include the cost of living crisis being exploited by greedy higher echelon DJs and the fact it’s getting harder to find names who haven’t previously made one.

And with Rivera now off the list, those fees have just got that little bit more expensive…

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