Oxfordhb 9780190281090 e 53

Evaluating the Past and Present of Sample-Based Hip Hop
Oxford Handbooks Online

Evaluating the Past and Present of Sample-Based Hip
Hop
Arvin Alaigh
The Oxford Handbook of Hip Hop Music
Edited by Justin D. Burton and Jason Lee Oakes
Subject: Music, Musicology and Music History Online Publication Date: Oct 2018
DOI: 10.1093/oxfordhb/9780190281090.013.53
Abstract and Keywords
This chapter examines how the prevalence of mainstream sample-based hip hop has
evolved over the last fifteen years. It locates the mid-2000s as a moment in which
sampling had been severely marginalized, and elaborates the confluence of factors—
including the prominence of the Southern production style, commercialization of hip hop,
and the rise of the ringtone industry—that yielded the subgenre of “ringtone rap.”
Primarily drawing on Billboard charts, as well as a novel metric called the “Sample-Based
Score,” this chapter charts the rise and fall of hip hop sampling vis-à-vis ringtone rap, up
through the contemporary moment. It ultimately concludes that sampling is more
prominent today than it was during the ringtone rap era, but will not return to its 1990s
ubiquity given the trends toward digitalization in hip hop production.
Keywords: sample-based hip hop, Southern hip hop, ringtone rap, ringtone industry, digital hip hop production
[Producers] weren’t sampling these records to cash in on the familiarity of the

original stuff. To be honest, it was all about sampling really obscure things […]
they were sampling those records because they heard something in that music
that spoke to them that they instantly wanted to inject themselves into the
narrative of that music. They heard it, they wanted to be a part of it, and all of a
sudden they found themselves in possession of the technology to do so, not much
unlike the way the Delta blues struck a chord with the Stones and the Beatles and
Clapton, and they felt the need to co-opt that music for the tools of their day.
—Mark Ronson (2014)
In the mid-1970s, DJ Kool Herc reached a crucial epiphany while deejaying Bronx block
parties—he noticed that partygoers intensely anticipated the instrumental breakbeat
sections of the funk, soul, and reggae records he played. The breakbeat sections, also
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known as breaks, refer to segments of songs (usually between three to ten seconds long)
wherein “the band breaks down, the rhythm section is isolated, basically where the bass
guitar and drummer take solos” (Rose 1994, 73). Herc channeled his observations in the
form of a new deejay technique called the “Merry-Go-Round,” in which he used two
copies of the same record, cueing up one to the beginning of the break as the other
reached the end, sometimes extending breaks to over five minutes long (Chang 2005, 79).
Manipulating breaks proved to be an enormously popular technique among early deejays,
ultimately becoming a foundational component to the hip hop experience.
The practice of looping sampled breaks can be tied to the African diasporic aesthetic of
culture production, which “carefully selects available media, texts, and contexts for
performative use” (Bartlett 1994, 639). It illuminates the centrality of rhythm in Black
music as well as the deconstructive and recuperative emphases inherent within Black
music production1 (Rose 1994, 65). As hip hop evolved from activity to object, deejays
grew into producers.2 And while turntables still retained significant functional and
performative roles, they were ultimately replaced with samplers as the primary tools for
hip hop production. For much of the last few decades, samples have served as the
foundation of hip hop music. Through the progressions in technology and methodology
over the 1980s and 1990s, sample-based hip hop remained the dominant style of
production. However, in Making Beats (2014), Joe Schloss observes a decline in sample-
based production:
[S]ample-based production—once the central approach used in hip-hop—is

becoming increasingly marginalized. This, in turn, has led some producers to
become more open to other approaches, while others, in response, have been even
more purist than they were when I began my research. (5)
Schloss’s reflections serve as a valuable point of departure in examining the trajectory of

hip hop sampling. Empirically, are his reflections accurate? If so, how can we
understanding the underlying factors that precipitated this transition away from sample-
based production?
In this chapter, I concentrate my investigation on one particular subgroup within hip hop
—mainstream. The qualifier “mainstream” does not necessarily reflect a certain genre of
hip hop, but rather a characteristic—the definition of mainstream hip hop is continually
evolving to reflect the immediate priorities of hip hop consumers. Given the diversity of
the genre, it would be infeasible to pinpoint any universal characteristics consistent
across all incarnations of hip hop production. Nevertheless, a study of mainstream hip
hop would be a valuable exercise, as it targets popular music that has resonated in the
hip hop community, as well as hip hop music that has resonated with pop audiences.
I begin by presenting a novel examination of hip hop sampling over the last thirty years,
devising a metric—a sample-based score (SBS)—in order to quantitatively assess the
extent to which a song has been sampled. My findings substantiate Schloss’s claims of
sample-based hip hop’s growing marginalization throughout the mid-2000s. I locate this
particular moment within mainstream hip hop, investigating the causal elements that
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facilitated the decline of sample-based production. I begin by briefly accounting the

fallout from the watershed case Grand Upright v. Warner Brothers (1991), which put
severe legal restrictions on sampling. Following that, I provide several contexts of the
Southern hip hop style, which diverged from the norm of sample-based production. I then
explore the progression of hip hop’s capitalization vis-à-vis broader music industry
trends, highlighting the immense popularity of the ringtone in the early to mid-2000s. The
prominence of the ringtone spawned an informal subgenre of hip hop, referred to as
“ringtone rap,” which dominated the hip hop mainstream until around 2009. Ringtone rap
production typically consisted of tinny, digitized sounds, simple lyrics, and memorable
hooks. I argue that these production techniques stem from traditions of Southern hip hop
that marginalize sample usage, especially the crunk aesthetic. Producers of ringtone rap
rarely employed samples, a tendency that I believe helps explain the disappearance of
sample-based production that Schloss observes. I continue by describing the decline of
the ringtone, along with ringtone rap, and concluding that sample-based production has
remained quite marginalized in mainstream hip hop, though not to the point of extinction.
Overall, I hope to contribute a holistic narrative that illustrates, and complicates, the
interplay between sample-based production, Southern hip hop, the business of ringtones,
and broader music industry trends.
Measuring Hip Hop Sampling over Time

Beginning in 1989, Billboard began recording the Hot Rap Songs chart, initially ranking
hip hop songs by sales figures—over the years, the calculation evolved to include factors
such as radio airplay, digital sales, and digital streaming. In this assessment, I use the
Billboard Hot Rap Songs chart as demonstrative of mainstream hip hop. In the first
assessment (Table 1), I list the #1 single on the Hot Rap Music chart for the first week of
January, followed by the #1 single for the first week of July, every year from 1990 up
through 2016. After listing the track, artist, and date of its #1 status, I research whether
the song has samples, and if so, how many, as well as their respective genres. I employ
the online resource WhoSampled.com in order to gather this information. In its catalog,
WhoSampled.com does not distinguish between production samples and vocal samples—
in my calculation, I include direct vocal samples, though I exclude samples that are
considered interpolated vocal samples (or alternatively, lyric samples), which refer to
instances in which an artist reappropriates a line from an existing track, usually to pay
homage. I consider direct vocal samples to be an instrument of production, while analysis
of interpolated vocal samples ought to be examined within the context of the songwriter,
MC, and/or vocalist.3
In the last column, I assign an SBS ranging from 0 to 3 to each track—this is a metric that
I have designed in order to signify a track’s reliance on sampling. I draw from Amanda
Sewell’s delineations of structural and surface samples in articulating this metric.
Broadly, structural samples “form the rhythmic and harmonic foundation of a sample-
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based track and create a track’s groove,” while surface samples “accent or rupture the
groove or lyrics without necessarily being a component of the groove or the lyrics
themselves” (Sewell 2014, 26, 48). As an example of a structural sample, consider one of
the most iconic hip hop hooks of all time: the saxophone riff from Tom Scott and the
California Dreamer’s “Today” that opens (and recurs throughout) Pete Rock and C.L.
Smooth’s “They Reminisce over You (T.R.O.Y.).” For examples of surface samples, consider
how the producer Timbaland sporadically samples the drums of Run-D.M.C.’s “Peter
Piper” at various moments throughout Missy Elliott’s “Work It.” Structural samples are
generally more suggestive of a track’s overall basis in samples, and thus are more
indicative of its SBS, whereas surface samples are mostly used in supplementing a track’s
production.4
A score of 0 indicates that the track did not use any samples in its production.
A score of 1 indicates that the sample is used primarily as an accessory in the song, most
likely as a surface sample. Wiz Khalifa’s “See You Again” is assigned a 1, as its only noted
sample is a very faint “Yeah!” taken from the first second of Ray Charles’s “Bye Bye
Love”—this sample, which is interspersed across various moments in Khalifa’s verses, is
merely a subtle accessory to the song’s production.
A score of 2 indicates that the samples are important components of the song, but not
necessarily indispensable to its production—perhaps only part of the track’s hook or
bridge draws from a sample. This score will most likely involve a structural sample, but it
will not underlie the entire track. T.I.’s “Live Your Life” uses an interpolation of O-Zone’s
“Dragostea Din Tei” for a part of its hook—the sample establishes a component of the
melody, though the melody does branch off for most of the hook.
A score of 3 indicates that the samples are fundamental to the track’s production, using
one or more structural samples that overtly permeate the track’s entirety. I consider
these tracks definitively sample-based. These tracks predominantly rely on one structural
sample (sometimes two, if one of the samples contains a drum/rhythm section) that
carries the entire track. Consider Puff Daddy & Faith Evans’s “I’ll Be Missing You” and
Drake’s “Hotline Bling” as tracks that draw from one structural sample (The Police’s
“Every Breath You Take” and Timmy Thomas’s “Why Can’t We Live Together”
respectively). Less frequent are those tracks that rely on two or more structural samples
in their production—consider Terminator X’s “Homey Don’t Play Dat” as an example.
Flo Rida’s “I Cry” represents a track that stands in between an SBS of 2 and 3. Sampling
from an electronic track by the Bingo Players titled “Cry (Just a Little),” this track
confounds the typical ranking system. Toward the beginning of the song, “I Cry”
seemingly appropriates the original track unchanged, save for a few added effects. But
there are moments that suggest a more substantial reworking of the original track by Flo
Rida’s producers—such as the bridge around 2:30—which preclude it from assuming the
“definitively sample-based” attribute of the aforementioned 3s.5
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While I apply somewhat of a social science framework in creating the following

assessments, they are not designed to withstand the utmost scientific and statistical
scrutiny.6 Consider that the information on WhoSampled.com is not directly from
producers themselves, but is crowd-sourced by site users—as a result, it may not
necessarily include all samples of a given track. On the other hand, the crowd-sourced
element endows the listed samples with a particular recognizability, which is relevant
given this study’s attention to popular, mainstream hip hop. In any case, I rely on the SBS
as the prime indicator of a track’s reliance on sampling, despite the metric’s subjectivity.
Having taken these imperfections into account, I maintain that this exercise may be
instructive in evaluating the nature of sampling in the past and present moments of
mainstream hip hop.
Table 1 Billboard Hot Rap Music Charts, #1 Singles—1990–2016
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* According to WhoSampled, the hook of “Party Like a Rock Star” interpolates a riff
from Yngwie Malmsteen’s “Black Star”—however, I do not agree with this contention,
as I believe the riffs significantly differ. Furthermore, I could not find any other
sources corroborating this alleged sample, so I assigned it an SBS of 0.
** “Fancy” is technically considered a sample of Iggy Azalea’s track “Leave It”—

however, both tracks use virtually identical instrumentals, so it strikes me more as a
remake than a sample. I have marked “Fancy” as sample-less, as the original track
does not contain any nonvocal samples.
Sample-based production is clearly widespread throughout the 1990s. But at the turn of
the millennium, we see a transition away from sample-based production—by the
mid-2000s, sampling is virtually absent in mainstream hip hop. This trend continues until
around 2009, when sample-based production appears to reemerge, though not to the
extent of the 1990s. In the present moment, it appears that sampling has remained an
important practice. Having published the first edition of Making Beats in 2004, Schloss
writes at the cusp of the sample-based production’s disappearance—thus, Table 1
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confirms Schloss’s claims regarding the marginalization of sample-based hip hop, at least
in the mainstream. Allow us to now review contexts that may have contributed to this
seismic shift in hip hop production style.
Hip Hop’s Sampling Tradition and the South

The rich history of hip hop sampling has been well chronicled over the past three
decades.7 As hip hop originated out of reappropriated breakbeats, it is no surprise that
early hip hop music heavily relied on sample-based production. The advent of digital
sampling in the early 1980s unleashed an explosion of creativity among hip hop
producers, helping vault hip hop music into the cultural mainstream and solidify the
practice of sampling in hip hop production. The massive, collaged landscapes of records
such as Public Enemy’s It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back (1988) and Fear of a
Black Planet (1990), the Beastie Boys’ Paul’s Boutique (1989), and De La Soul’s 3 Feet
High and Rising (1989) demonstrated the limitless capacity for sampling in hip hop
production.8
The 1991 landmark case Grand Upright v. Warner Bros. represents a pivotal moment in
the history of hip hop sampling. The ruling sent shockwaves throughout the hip hop
community, as virtually overnight, producers encountered a surge of litigation from
sampled artists. Carl Falstrom writes:
Four days after the ruling, Tuff City Records, a New York–based independent
label, sued Sony Music Inc. and the Sony distributed label Def Jam Records over a
drum sample. About a month later, Bridgeport Music, a publishing company,
brought suit to enjoin the manufacture and sale of a hit record containing a
sample of a recording to which it owned the copyright. A group calling itself “The
Association of Parliament/Funkadelic Members 1971–83” filed a massive suit
alleging that it owns copyrights to recordings created by George Clinton that have
been sampled by at least sixty-two recording acts (1994, 367).
Grand Upright established legal precedent that severely curbed a producer’s ability to
sample, unless supported by a record label prepared to spend incredible sums in royalty
fees.9 But as illustrated by Table 1, mainstream hip hop retained sample-based
production, albeit shifting away from the maximalist production style.
By the early 1990s, hip hop culture had germinated well beyond its initial enclave of the
South Bronx, gaining popularity across the country. And while dominant hip hop
discourses constructed a regional dichotomy between the East and West coasts, hip hop
culture flourished throughout the South. It would be nearly impossible to assign any
characteristics to the entirety of Southern hip hop culture. The region’s incredible
diversity—ranging from Virginia, to Houston, to Atlanta, to Memphis—has yielded a
number of different styles, techniques, and priorities in hip hop creation. However, we
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can discern particular tendencies that developed across (ostensibly) disparate Southern
hip hop subcultures. Specifically, in our context of sampling, a number of prominent
artists and producers diverged from the standard practices of sample-based production—
I will attempt to highlight this context and situate it within the context of the early to
mid-2000s, which appears to be the moment in which sampling practices deviate from the
norm of the early phases.
As luminaries of Southern hip hop, OutKast is unequivocally regarded among hip hop
canon’s most important artists. Hailing from Atlanta, the duo largely drew the defining
features of their aesthetic and music—such as “live instrumentation,” “eccentric
presentation,” and “rock and hard-funk flavors”—from the local funk-tinged soul outfit,
Cameo (Sarig 2007, 100). The production group Organized Noize, who worked with
Southern artists such as TLC, Goodie Mob, and Ludacris, handled much of OutKast’s
early material, including their classic Southernplayalisticadillacmuzik. Notably, their
production style minimized the role of sampling, an aberration when assessing the hip
hop landscape of the early 1990s. They instead sought to create original material played
live in studio—Organized Noize eventually amassed a regular cast of Atlanta musicians to
materialize their hip hop visions. In an interview, one member of Organized Noize cites
Dr. Dre’s The Chronic as inspiration for their unique setup—instead of using digital
samplers, as was the norm, Dre used live musicians to interpolate the numerous funk
samples on the record (Sarig 2007, 130). Though in a sense, OutKast and Organized
Noize expanded Dre’s method, choosing to play newly composed material as opposed to
funk interpolations. Over the course of their sixteen-year recording career, they remained
reluctant to sample to the extent of their contemporaries, an important point when
considering their mainstream success in the early–mid 2000s. As pioneers of Atlanta hip
hop, OutKast had a formative role in the creation of the trap movement in the mid-2000s,
influencing artists such as T.I., Jeezy, and Gucci Mane by, among other things, helping
normalize sample-less hip hop production.
Virginia proved to be a hotbed for hip hop innovation, particularly in Virginia Beach and
its surrounding areas. The region spawned two titans of hip hop production in Pharrell
Williams and Timbaland, both of whom creatively benefited from the Tidewater region’s
“melting pot” culture. As two of the most successful, hip hop-pop crossover producers of
the 2000s, their sampling practices are worth noting. Neither abided by typical hip hop
production convention that privileged the sample as the centerpiece of a given track.
Early in his career, Pharrell demonstrated his wide-ranging musical capacity as frontman
of N.E.R.D., an alternative-funk-hip hop fusion band. His hip hop production reflects this
eclecticness—he frequently employs unconventional means such as live instrumentation
and synthesizers in the creation of new material, as opposed to traditional sample-based
production. Timbaland is also novel in his sampling tendencies—in addition to regularly
tapping Indian, East Asian, and Middle Eastern sources, he is known for sampling and
manipulating recordings of his own voice and embedding them throughout his work.10
And while he does occasionally produce the usual sort of sample-based hip hop,
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Timbaland’s commercial hip hop hits, such as “Dirt off Your Shoulder,” “Get Ur Freak
On,” and “Make Me Better” represent the success of his own atypical brand of
production.11
The rise of crunk in the late 1990s serves as the most influential context in understanding
the nexus of Southern hip hop and sample-based production. Stylistically derived from
Miami bass and Memphis buck, along with aspects of New Orleans bounce, crunk in its
initial incarnation consisted of “roughneck chants backed with 808 beats and humming
bass” (Sarig 2007, 286). These subcultures diverged from the hip hop purists in how they
regarded sample-based production—while sampling was certainly used, producers in
Miami, Memphis, and New Orleans did not ascribe the same inherent value to the
practice (and its accompanying ethic and culture) as their East Coast and West Coast
counterparts. In 1997, Atlanta’s Lil’ Jon & the East Side Boyz released Get Crunk, Who U
Wit: Da Album, which is regarded as the first crunk record. The purpose of crunk was
clear: it served as party music to be blared from club speakers. Early crunk stripped away
the frills of the typical hip hop track, embracing minimalist, sample-less production
coupled with easily chantable hooks that excited any listeners. But the commercial
success of similar artists, such as Three 6 Mafia and Master P, suggested their music may
have been becoming more accessible to popular audiences (Sarig 2007, 287). Crunk
definitively broke into the mainstream in 2002, when Lil’ Jon & the East Side Boyz
released their fourth studio album, Kings of Crunk. The record went double-platinum and
catapulted crunk to the forefront of the Southern hip hop movement. It incorporated
aspects of mainstream hip hop in its melodic synthesizer-layered production quality,
though it maintained a sample-less production. The collectively chanted hooks remained
the centerpiece of each track, and epitomized the carefree, crunk ethos embedded
throughout the music.
Hip Hop’s Evolving Capitalization

The success of Sugarhill Gang’s “Rapper’s Delight” in 1979 marked the first moment
wherein hip hop revealed itself to be a commercializable enterprise.12 Record labels
quickly took note, and began investing in the development of hip hop artists throughout
the 1980s. However, the advent of the Nielsen Soundscan sales measurement system in
1991 enabled access to genuine sales data. Prior to Soundscan, there were no concrete
means through which record label executives could assess sales measures. Charts,
including Billboard, were “notoriously unreliable,” as they frequently involved under-the-
table transactions of money, gifts, and favors in exchange for swelled sales numbers
(Rose 2008, 15). But since Soundscan recorded album sales at the time of purchase, there
was little room for fabrication, and executives could finally access objective data. The
new information showed that gangsta rap was enormously popular among younger
demographics.13 Within two weeks of the implementation of Soundscan, N.W.A.’s
Efil4zaggin’ claimed the top spot on the Billboard 200. Following the revelations of hip
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hop’s commercial viability, labels started pouring more resources into production,
distribution, and promotion (Rose 2008, 15). “Urban marketing” schemes appeared in
order to promote hip hop culture, as brands flocked toward record labels and artists to
capitalize on their appeal to the young consumer.
Throughout the 1990s, physical album sales predominated as the primary means through
which both artists and record labels profited. But the proliferation of the Internet set in
motion a gradual transformation of the music industry, away from the physical and
toward the digital. At the turn of the millennium, artists earned two-thirds of their income
from music sales, and the other third came from concert tours, merchandise, and
endorsements—by 2007, that ratio had inverted (The Economist, 2007). The digitization
of music purchasing initially came as a response to the rise in music piracy, which had
markedly adverse effects on business: “According to the Recording Industry Association
of America, physical sales of recorded music experienced a 33% decrease between 1999
and 2006 (the decrease is about 21% if digital sales are included)” (Bourreau et al. 2008,
2). As record labels hemorrhaged revenue from music piracy, they sought novel,
innovative measures to recuperate losses—one of the most lucrative of these was the
ringtone industry.14
While customizable ringtones had existed since the late 1990s, their popularity
skyrocketed in the early 2000s, largely due to the spread of polyphonic technology. These
tones provided a significant upgrade from the industry standard of monophonic tones,
whose capacity was limited to a single-line melody in a low frequency range,
accompanied by a “tinny, somewhat unpleasant, somewhat piercing sound” (Gopinath
2013). Polyphonic ringtones possessed a more complex sound derived from a MIDI-type
of synthesizer, which allowed for discernable recreations of actual songs. By 2003, about
66 percent of the world’s mobile phones could produce polyphonic ringtones, a jump from
about 9 percent in 2000 (Gopinath 2013). By 2003, worldwide ringtone sales had reached
$3.5 billion, which marked a 40 percent increase from 2002—by comparison, Apple’s
iTunes generated under $100 million worldwide in 2004 (The Economist 2004). The year
2004 also saw the mainstream adoption of Truetones, which were ringtones composed of
direct song excerpts.15 Truetones marked the final stage in the ringtone revolution,
rapidly consuming industry market share and obsolescing polyphonic tones. By Q3 2005,
Truetones held 62.4 percent of the revenue share, while standard (polyphonic) ringtones
had 29.6 percent—at the end of Q2 2006, this gap had widened to 74.6 percent and 12.0
percent respectively (Telephia 2006).16
For music industry executives, Truetones were preferable to polyphonics for three
primary reasons. First, consumers embraced the upgrade in quality provided by the
Truetone, as evidenced by the rising ringtone sales post-2004. Second, a Truetone cost
more per download than its polyphonic counterpart: according to a 2006 figure, the
former cost upward of $3, while the latter ranged between $1.99 and $2.50 (Gundersen
2006). Truetones meant that more units of higher priced, and higher quality, ringtones
had been sold. Third, Truetones allowed for record companies and mobile corporations to
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directly interface, without the intermediary polyphonic tone producer taking a share of
revenue.
Ringtone Rap
An examination of ringtone sales in the mid-2000s illuminates hip hop’s dominance in the
ringtone industry. Consider Table 2, which lists the inaugural Ringtones Chart from late
2004—sourced by the newly created Nielsen RingScan measurement, the chart tracked
the sales of polyphonic ringtones:
Table 2 Billboard (Polyphonic) Ringtones Chart, November 6, 2004
Title Artist
1 My Boo Usher and Alicia Keys
2 Lean Back Terror Squad
3 Drop It Like It’s Hot Snoop Dogg, feat. Pharrell
4 Locked Up Akon, feat. Styles P
5 Halloween John Carpenter
6 Sunshine Lil’ Flip, feat. Lea
7 Goodies Ciara, feat. Petey Pablo
8 Freek-a-Leek Petey Pablo
9 Game over (Flip) Lil’ Flip
10 Yeah! Usher, feat. Lil Jon & Ludacris
11 Headsprung LL Cool J
12 Breathe, Stretch, Shake Mase, feat. P. Diddy
13 Ice Ice Baby Vanilla Ice
14 Big Pimpin’ JAY-Z, feat. UGK
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15 Get Low Lil’ Jon & The East Side Boyz, feat. Ying Yang
Twins
16 Super Mario Brothers Koji Kondo

Theme
17 She Will Be Loved Maroon 5
18 Bad Boys Inner Circle
19 The Pink Panther Theme Henry Mancini
20 Turn Me On Kevin Lyttle feat. Spragga Benz
Only four out of the twenty tracks (“Halloween,” “Super Mario Brothers Theme,” “She
Will Be Loved,” and “The Pink Panther Theme”) are definitively not hip hop, while two
others (“My Boo,” “Turn Me On”) draw on hip hop elements, but are closer to R&B and
Dancehall respectively, signifying an interesting coalescence of genre categories into a
pop–hip hop hybrid prevalent in the mid-2000s. All fourteen hip hop tracks possess
striking hooks that translated well in the polyphonic format.
But this is not to suggest the amenability of hip hop to the polyphonic format was the
exclusive reason for its popularity in polyphonic ringtone sales—hip hop continued its
market dominance into the Truetones era. Beginning on November 4, 2006, Billboard
began releasing the Hot RingMasters chart, which tracked Truetones sales.17 While this
first chart was a relatively weak showing for hip hop (hip hop constituted only eight out of
the top twenty songs), we can turn to the cumulative RingScan totals between September
4, 2006, and December 31, 2006, shown in Table 3, for a more comprehensive picture of
that time period:
Table 3 Nielsen RingScan: Top 10 Mastertones (September 4, 2006–December 31,

2006)
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* “Chain Hang Low” does not directly sample in its production, though its hook
samples the melody of a nineteenth-century folk song, “Turkey in the Straw.” Given
that it is a structural sample that shapes the hook, I assign it an SBS of 2.
With one exception (Lips of an Angel), all the top Truetone sales came from hip hop (or
hip hop–pop crossover) tracks. Other than “Chain Hang Low,” no track on the list uses
any sort of structural sample in its production. We can consider “Chain Hang Low” as an
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illuminating archetype that demonstrates the particularities of ringtone rap.18 Though

originally a nineteenth-century folk song called “Turkey in the Straw,” its melody became
reappropriated in the popular nursery rhyme, “Do Your Ears Hang Low”—perhaps most
strikingly, it serves as the classic Ice Cream Truck song. The success of “Chain Hang
Low” lay in its melody’s recognizability, whose register was clearly within the range (and
thus, discernible) through typical phone speakers.19 The track hybridizes unlikely
contexts—it melds memories of the familiar chimes of ice cream in the summertime and
the thundering bass of heavy, electronic kicks, which were typical of the Southern
aesthetic. The end result was a hit track and a popular ringtone: the synthesis of a happy
melody (or rather, one we have been conditioned to enjoy) with Southern overtones, and
especially amenable to the increasingly mobile-based landscape of the music industry.
“Walk It Out,” “We Fly High,” “Smack That,” “Chain Hang Low,” and “I Wanna Love You”
are tracks that likely would not have experienced much mainstream success prior to the
2000s. They each possess a simple melodic, singable hook, as well as a heavily produced,
layered synthesizer sound that likely would have retained its timbre over a phone’s
speakers. They all adhered to some hybrid of the aforementioned Southern aesthetic—
crunk’s influence is pronounced—to be contrasted with the gritty, muted sound
traditionally associated with East Coast hip hop. In fact, almost all of the artists and
producers are Southern. “My Love” and “Sexyback” are Timbaland-produced, and
“Money Maker” is a Pharrell-produced track by Ludacris, who is from Atlanta. DJ Unk and
T.I. also hail from Atlanta, while Jibbs is a St. Louis rapper. Also consider Akon, who is
originally from Senegal, though he has essentially adopted Atlanta as his home base.20
Aside from Snoop Dogg, East and West Coast rappers are conspicuously absent from this
list, a surprising fact, given how 1990s mainstream hip hop centralized those two regions.
This generation of mainstream hip hop, which began around 2004 and lasted until about
2009, is (in most cases, pejoratively) referred to as the era of “Ringtone Rap.” It was a
time when record companies sought to mitigate their hemorrhaging, caused by music
piracy, by any means necessary. In ringtones, they found an innovative way to
remuneratively repurpose their artists’ music. Upon realizing ringtones’ potential for
profit, record executives sought and promoted tracks with catchy, resonant hooks. And as
commercial labels overtly privileged this one dimension, artists themselves began
accentuating this quality in their work. A 2007 quote from an executive at EMI Music
Publishing sums up this phenomenon well: “About one or two weeks ago, one of the
saddest things happened to me, when (an artist) played me a record and said, ‘This would
make a hot ringtone’” (Gopinath 2013). The financial imperative provided by ringtone
sales should be coupled with the economic incentive of sample-less production—tracks
without samples meant that record companies did not have to allocate enormous sums of
money for royalty fees. Amid the alarming losses in profits induced by music piracy, this
must have been a welcome development for industry executives. To many hip hop purists,
one-hit wonders such as MIMS, Shop Boyz, D4L, and J-Kwon epitomize the musical
Page 20 of 39

bankruptcy of ringtone rap. They regard this era as a blemish in the hip hop canon, a
time when “real” hip hop had been subverted for the sake of record companies’ profits.
Ringtone rap is especially disappointing for those purists that value sampling in hip hop
production. In Table 3, I observed the infrequency of samples and concluded that those
tracks drew from traditions of Southern hip hop that relatively minimized the role of
sampling—consider Tables 4 and 5, respectively, for the Hot Rap Songs and Hot Ringtones
charts taken from mid-year 2007:
Table 4 Hot Rap Songs, June 2, 2007
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* While the WhoSampled database does not have any samples listed for “I Tried,” it is
worth noting that Bone Thugs-N-Harmony, along with Akon and producer Swizz Beatz,
were sued for illegally sampling Rasa’s 1978 track “When the Day Will Come.” The
outcome of this litigation, which was reported in 2009, is unclear. Given that I cannot
discern any lifted portions from Rasa’s track, coupled with its absence on
WhoSampled, I have assigned an SBS of 0.
Table 5 Hot Ringtones Chart, June 2, 2007
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These charts maintain the aforementioned trends of rare sampling, prominent hooks, and
Southern artists. Of everyone listed in Table 4, Fabolous is the only East Coast rapper, as
the vast majority of the others are Southern (a plurality from Atlanta). Only three out of
the ten tracks use structural samples, two of which occupy the last two spots on the
chart. Table 5 crystallizes the relationship between sample-based production and ringtone
rap—while four of the top ten are not relevant for our purposes, none of the six hip hop
Page 24 of 39

tracks employs a structural sample in its production. In the one outlier that does use
sampling, Jim Jones’s “We Fly High,” the (surface) sample only serves as an eight-second
introduction that is never revisited throughout the track.
Between 2007 and 2008, the ringtone industry saw sales drop 24%, from $714 million to
$541 million, which caused the overall mobile music market (which consisted of
streaming/radio, full tracks, ringback tones, and ringtones) to post an annual decline for
the first time. In 2007, ringtones constituted about 80 percent of the mobile music market
—this number dipped to 63 percent in 2008 (Cellular News 2009), marking the beginning
of an all-out freefall for ringtone sales, which continued plummeting over the next few
years. By 2012, the industry had only made $167 million, and by 2014, Billboard
discontinued their Ringtones chart (Hare 2013). Commentators have cited two reasons
for the quick collapse of the ringtone industry. First, that ringtones’ novelty quickly wore
off; second, that numerous audio-editing web programs surfaced to create custom
ringtones out of existing music files.21
The fate of ringtone rap mirrored that of the ringtone industry: it met a swift demise. It
seemed to maintain a presence in the Ringtone and Hot Rap charts through 2008, but
began fading from the charts around 2009. Consider Table 6, which lists the Hot Rap
Songs charts of the first week of 2009:
Table 6 Hot Rap Songs, January 3, 2009
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While the SBSs remain quite low, most tracks are not stereotypically ringtone rap. I
would consider “Arab Money,” “Put It on Ya,” and “Got Money” to be the only three that
align with the subgenre. They each have the characteristic, synth-heavy hooks that are
well within the register of the typical phone speaker. One other, “Pop Champagne,” draws
elements from ringtone rap, but to a lesser extent—its verses are largely sans-melody,
composed of low-register rapping over (what sounds like) a digitally altered conga
rhythm, though the hook does contain an industry-standard autotuned bit. By January of
2010 (the week of January 2, 2010), ringtone rap had nearly vanished from the Hot Rap
charts. At this point, hip hop’s ringtone hegemony had also subsided, as only six hip hop
songs populate the Ringtones chart top twenty. Quickly as it formed, the symbiosis of the
ringtone and hip hop industries had all but evaporated by 2010.
Sampling in the Present

Table 1 suggests that the disappearance of ringtone rap catalyzes a renewal in sampling.
Let us examine Hot Rap Songs charts of the last five years for a more thorough picture,
as per Tables 7, 8, 9, 10, and 11:
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The results of the cross-section evince that sampling has certainly not undergone a
renaissance—however, sampling still exists, and has not been entirely marginalized since
the ringtone rap era. There is at least one instance of a track that consequentially
employs sample-based production in each chart, and the remaining sample-less tracks
assume an array of forms. Tracks such as “White Iverson” and “Lotus Flower Bomb” have
R&B overtones, while YG’s “My Hitta” has a classic West Coast vibe—“Thrift Shop” and
“The Monster” are pop-crossover songs produced for Top 40 radio play. This diversity is a
stark difference to the uniform, formulaic tendencies of sample-less hip hop during the
ringtone rap era.
In Tables 7–11, the hip hop artists whose tracks employ sample-based production—Big
Sean, J. Cole, Flo Rida, Kanye West, Drake, and Travi$ Scott—have all experienced
mainstream success. Based on this small sample, we can postulate that sample-based
production—in contemporary mainstream hip hop—is more frequently found among
established, popular artists. A budding new school, which is represented in these tables
by Future, Rae Sremmurd, Mike Will-Made-It, Bobby Shmurda, and O.T. Genasis, is far
less likely to sample for two related reasons. First, digital hip hop production has become
remarkably more accessible since about 2010—programs such as Fruity Loops have
democratized professional-level tools of hip hop production. Major producers, such as
Metro Boomin, Hit-Boy, and Lex Luger, have cited Fruity Loops as their preferred digital
audio workstation (DAW) (Iadarola 2015). These producers allude to the second reason
for the absence of sampling in new school hip hop: the influence of the Southern trap
style, which downplays sample-based production. Consider “Jumpman,” “23,” “CoCo,”
and “No Type,” which all draw from tenets of contemporary trap production, such as
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booming 808s, synthesized riffs, and intricate hi-hat patterns. While early Atlanta trap did
not have the same aversion to sampling, the present, digital incarnation of trap is far less
accommodating of any meaningful sample-based production.
The above observations converge into some overarching, important questions—why have
southern producers historically avoided sampling in their work, and what effect has this
had on the contemporary state of mainstream hip hop and its predominating modes of
production? What does this mean for the future of mainstream hip hop sampling?
Throughout the 1990s, various Southern contexts—diverse in and of themselves—bred

production styles that did not emphasize sample usage to the extent of the East Coast
orthodoxy of the time. While most mainstream hip hop remained reliant on sample-based
production throughout this era (albeit at a declining rate given the rise in sampling-
related litigation following the Grand Upright ruling), sample-less hip hop production
continued to thrive across the South. Vibrant subcultures of independent hip hop,
particularly in Atlanta, emerged during the 1990s and 2000s. Recall that sampling
generally requires major label support for licensing and royalty fees, so hip hop
producers and artists who do not employ sampling need not rely on major label support
to the extent of their sample-based counterparts. Crunk assumes a foundational role in
the trajectory of the Southern aesthetic—in the late 1990s and early 2000s, crunk
perfected and popularized the formula of synthesizer-heavy, sample-less production, and
provided a blueprint for what would ultimately become ringtone rap. The uniqueness of
ringtone rap—from its intended output via tinny cell phone speakers, to the centrality of
its impressionable hooks, to its widespread capitalization and dissemination—caused a
radical shift in popular hip hop production. Ringtone rap production drew from a
traditionally Southern style, molded to the aforementioned particularities—but in turn,
the legacy of ringtone rap (and by extension, its technological moment) influenced the
future of Southern hip hop, calcifying digital production as a viable means of creating hip
hop, and paving the way for today’s new school.
Current hip hop trends indicate that mainstream hip hop will stand distant from sampling
—however, I would not argue that sampling will become obsolete, as has the ringtone rap
era, any time in the near future. In one respect, there will always be a cachet of
authenticity associated with sample-based production; in another, more aesthetic respect,
I am uncertain that sample-less production could ever replicate the full, stratified sound
of a sample-based track. Furthermore, there is no financial imperative as mammoth,
profitable, and looming as the ringtone industry was in 2004. Barring any unforeseen
disruptions, the music industry will continue in the course charted out by digital
streaming and social media. I doubt the practice of sampling will ever experience a
renaissance given this path, but for many, it will always exist as a staple of hip hop
production.
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Conclusion
As one of the foundations of hip hop culture, the role of sample-based production is
critical in analyzing the trajectory of hip hop music. The fascinating narrative begins with
the various southern contexts that emerged throughout the 1990s, shepherded by artists
such as OutKast, Timbaland, Pharrell, and Lil’ Jon, who revolutionized how hip hop music
could be created. A confluence of factors in the mid-2000s spurred a radical redefinition
of mainstream hip hop—the result assumed the form of ringtone rap, a subgenre that
heavily drew from Southern styles and grossed billions of dollars in ringtones and music
sales over its four years of relevancy. For better or worse, ringtone rap left an indelible
mark on the hip hop canon, and helped usher in a wave of digital hip hop production that
presently dominates the hip hop mainstream. Sample-based production has never fully
recovered from the blows of ringtone rap, but I predict that it will persist as a tool for
producers in the future.
References
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http://www.economist.com/node/9443082.
Agawu, Kofi. 1995. “The Invention of ‘African Rhythm.’” Journal of the American
Musicological Society 48 (3): 380–395. doi:10.2307/3519832.
Bartlett, Andrew. 1994. “Airshafts, Loudspeakers, and the Hip Hop Sample: Contexts and
African American Musical Aesthetics.” African American Review 28 (4): 639–652. http://
www.jstor.org/stable/3042229.
Bourreau, Marc, François Moreau, and Michel Gensollen. 2008. “The Digitization of the
Recorded Music Industry: Impact on Business Models and Scenarios of Evolution.”
Telecom Paris: Working Papers in Economics and Social Sciences, January. doi:10.2139/
ssrn.1092138.
Chang, Jeff. 2005. Can’t Stop, Won’t Stop: A History of the Hip-Hop Generation. New
York: St. Martin’s Press.
Falstrom, Carl A. 1994. “Thou Shalt Not Steal: Grand Upright Music Ltd. v. Warner Bros.
Records, Inc. and the Future of Digital Sound Sampling in Popular Music.” Hastings Law
Journal 45 (2): 359–381.
George, Nelson. 2004. “Sample This.” In That’s the Joint! The Hip-Hop Studies Reader,
edited by Mark Anthony Neal and Murray Forman, 437–441. New York: Routledge.
Gopinath, Sumanth S. 2013. The Ringtone Dialectic: Economy and Cultural Form.
Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
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Gundersen, Edna. 2006. “Mastertones Ring Up Profits.” November 29, 2006. Accessed
December 8, 2016. http://usatoday30.usatoday.com/life/music/news/2006-11-28-
mastertones-main_x.htm.
Hare, Breeanna. 2013. “Whatever Happened to the Ringtone?” CNN, May 16, 2013.
Accessed December 13, 2016. http://edition.cnn.com/2013/05/09/tech/mobile/
ringtones-phones-decline/.
Iadarola, Alexander. 2015. “13 Things All Fruity Loops Producers Know to Be True.” The
FADER. October 6, 2015. http://www.thefader.com/2014/10/31/13-things-all-fruity-
loops-producers-know-to-be-true.
Johnson, A. Dean. 1993. “Music Copyrights: The Need for an Appropriate Fair Use
Analysis in Digital Sampling Infringement Suits.” Florida State University Law Review 21
(1): 135–166.
Kajikawa, Loren. 2015. Sounding Race in Rap Songs. Berkeley: University of California
Press.
Kelley, Frannie, Ali Shaheed Muhammed, and Marley Marl. 2013. “Marley Marl on the
Bridge Wars, LL Cool J and Discovering Sampling.” NPR Microphone Check. Accessed
January 15, 2016. http://www.npr.org/sections/microphonecheck/
2013/09/11/221440934/marley-marl-on-the-bridge-wars-ll-cool-j-and-discovering-
sampling.
“Mark Ronson: How Sampling Transformed Music.” 2014. Accessed March 10, 2016.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H3TF-hI7zKc.
Marshall, Wayne. 2006. “Giving Up Hip-Hop’s Firstborn: A Quest for the Real after the
Death of Sampling.” Callaloo 29 (3): 868–892. http://www.jstor.org/stable/4488375.
Marshall, Wayne. 2014. “Treble Culture.” In The Oxford Handbook of Mobile Music
Studies, Vol. 2, edited by Sumanth Gopinath and Jason Stanyek, 43–76. New York: Oxford
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McLeod, Kembrew, Chuck D, and Hank Shocklee. 2004. “How Copyright Law Changed
Hip Hop.” Alternet.org. Accessed January 15, 2016. http://www.alternet.org/story/
18830/how_copyright_law_changed_hip_hop.
McLeod, Kembrew. 2007. Freedom of Expression®: Resistance and Repression in the Age
of Intellectual Property. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
McLeod, Kembrew, and Peter DiCola. 2011. Creative License: The Law and Culture of
Digital Sampling. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
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Neff, Ali Colleen. 2013. “The New Masters of Eloquence: Southernness, Senegal, and
Transatlantic Hip-Hop Mobilities.” Southern Cultures 19 (1): 7–25. doi:10.1353/scu.
2013.0001.
Potter, Russell A. 1995. Spectacular Vernaculars: Hip-Hop and the Politics of

Postmodernism. Albany: State University of New York Press.
Powell, Elliott H. 2013. “Hip Hop’s South Asian Disembodied Voice: Sampling,
Temporality, and the Career of Raje Shwari.” IASPM-US 2013 David Sanjek Memorial
Graduate Student Paper Prize Winner. http://iaspm-us.net/iaspm-us-2013-david-
sanjek-memorial-graduate-student-paper-prize-winner-elliott-h-powell/.
Quinn, Eithne. 2005. Nuthin’ but a “G” Thang: The Culture and Commerce of Gangsta
Rap. New York: Columbia University Press.
Rabaka, Reiland. 2013. The Hip Hop Movement from R&B and the Civil Rights Movement
to Rap and the Hip Hop Generation. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books.
“Realtones Account for More Than 76% of Mobile Consumer Spending on Music
Personalization, According to Telephia.” 2006. Telephia. Accessed December 9, 2016.
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“Ringtone Sales Decline in the USA.” 2009. Cellular News, August 6, 2009. Accessed
December 9, 2016. http://www.cellular-news.com/story/Services/38984.php.
Rose, Tricia. 1994. Black Noise: Rap Music and Black Culture in Contemporary America.
Hanover, NH: University Press of New England.
Rose, Tricia. 2008. The Hip Hop Wars: What We Talk about When We Talk about Hip Hop
—And Why It Matters. New York: Basic Civitas.
Sarig, Roni. 2007. Third Coast: OutKast, Timbaland, and How Hip-Hop Became a
Southern Thing. Cambridge, MA: Da Capo Press.
Schloss, Joseph Glenn. 2014. Making Beats: The Art of Sample-Based Hip-Hop. 2nd ed.
Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press.
Sewell, Amanda. 2013. “A Typology of Sampling in Hip-Hop.” PhD diss. Indiana

University. http://in-the-write.com/uploads/3/3/0/0/3300712/sewell_-
_a_typology_of_sampling_in_hip-hop.pdf.
Sewell, Amanda. 2014. “Paul’s Boutique and Fear of a Black Planet: Digital Sampling and
Musical Style in Hip Hop.” Journal of the Society for American Music 8 (1): 28–48. doi:
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Tingen, Paul. 2005. “The Dust Brothers: Sampling, Remixing & The Boat Studio.” Sound
on Sound, May 2005. Accessed February 20, 2016. http://www.soundonsound.com/sos/
may05/articles/dust.htm.
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Arbor: University of Michigan Press.
Notes:
(1) Agawu (1995) interrogates the notion of African rhythm extensively.
(2) See Potter (1994, 45–46) for an elaboration of the evolution of hip hop as an activity to
hip hop as an object.
(3) There certainly is some gray area in regard to what constitutes an interpolation versus
a reperformance or a cover—if any future projects were to construct a more robust
sample-based metric, this is a nuance worth taking into account.
(4) Some artists, such as Public Enemy, De La Soul, and the Beastie Boys, produced tracks
relying on dozens (and in some cases, hundreds) of surface samples per song. However,
this practice enjoyed a relatively short lifespan, becoming marginalized with the
expansion of sampling-related music copyright law beginning in the 1990s, as I later
explain.
(5) This example speaks to the difficulty in applying the SBS metric to other genres that
implement sampling, such as electronic music.
(6) I intend on following up this chapter, which aims at a qualitative explanation of the
fluctuation in sample-based production, with a more comprehensive, quantitative study
specifically analyzing how SBS scores have evolved over time.
(7) See Justin A. Williams (2013) for an authoritative, book-length study on sampling—in
addition, Rose (1994), George (2004), Chang (2005), Kelley et al. (2013), and Marshall
(2006).
(8) Consider Sewell (2014) for an examination of Paul’s Boutique and Fear of a Black
Planet specifically. Also see Tingen (2005) for a valuable interview with The Dust
Brothers, the team that produced much of Paul’s Boutique.
(9) See McLeod and DiCola (2011) for an extensive treatment of copyright law
surrounding digital sampling. Also McLeod (2007), McLeod et al. (2004), Johnson (1993),
and Falstrom (1994) are valuable resources in understanding the climate of hip hop
sampling in the aftermath of Grand Upright.
Page 37 of 39

(10) See Powell (2013) for a comprehensive analysis of Timbaland’s production style,
specifically his tendency to draw on Indian, East Asian, and Middle Eastern sources
throughout his work.
(11) There are a number of additional Timbaland-produced songs that straddle the lines of
hip hop, and pop, that I omitted given this article’s focus on hip hop—these tracks include
“Cry Me a River,” “The Way I Are,” “My Love,” and “Try Again.”
(12) This moment has been enshrined within the legend of early hip hop history—for an
elaboration on the Sugar Hill Gang and hip hop’s first major commodification, see Chang
(2005), Kajikawa (2015), Rabaka (2013), and Potter (1995).
(13) Quinn (2005) focuses on the cultural implications of the commercialization of gangsta
rap.
(14) The ringtone industry could very well be subsumed into the mobile music industry
writ large, though I restrict my examination to solely ringtones.
(15) Truetones have also been referred to as Mastertones and Realtones.
(16) The remaining 7.7% and 11.5% respectively consisted of Ringback tones, which are a
separate entity from polyphonic ringtones and Truetones.
(17) Though it is unclear when, Billboard eventually stops tracking polyphonic ringtone
sales—the Hot RingMasters chart then becomes the standard Ringtones chart.
(18) Thanks to Justin Burton for pointing out the potential usefulness of this brief “Chain
Hang Low” case study.
(19) See Wayne Marshall (2014) for a complete look at this phenomenon, which he refers
to as “treble culture.”
(20) Consider Neff (2013) for a fascinating assessment of Akon’s relationship with the
Southern hip hop tradition.
(21) It is worth mentioning that the iPhone debuted in 2007—Gopinath (2013) considers
the iPhone in a number of contexts related to the decline of the ringtone.
Arvin Alaigh
Arvin Alaigh is a writer based out of New Jersey, interested in politics, culture, and
music. He has degrees from the College of William & Mary and the University of
Cambridge, and has served as the Hip Hop Director of WCWM 90.9 FM.
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Evaluating the Past and Present of Sample-Based Hip Hop

Oxford Handbooks Online

Abstract and Keywords

[Producers] weren’t sampling these records to cash in on the familiarity of the

—Mark Ronson (2014)

Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 11 October 2018

[S]ample-based production—once the central approach used in hip-hop—is

Schloss’s reflections serve as a valuable point of departure in examining the trajectory of

Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 11 October 2018

facilitated the decline of sample-based production. I begin by briefly accounting the

Measuring Hip Hop Sampling over Time

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While I apply somewhat of a social science framework in creating the following

Table 1 Billboard Hot Rap Music Charts, #1 Singles—1990–2016

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** “Fancy” is technically considered a sample of Iggy Azalea’s track “Leave It”—

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Hip Hop’s Sampling Tradition and the South

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Hip Hop’s Evolving Capitalization

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Table 2 Billboard (Polyphonic) Ringtones Chart, November 6, 2004

1 My Boo Usher and Alicia Keys

2 Lean Back Terror Squad

3 Drop It Like It’s Hot Snoop Dogg, feat. Pharrell

4 Locked Up Akon, feat. Styles P

5 Halloween John Carpenter

6 Sunshine Lil’ Flip, feat. Lea

7 Goodies Ciara, feat. Petey Pablo

8 Freek-a-Leek Petey Pablo

9 Game over (Flip) Lil’ Flip

10 Yeah! Usher, feat. Lil Jon & Ludacris

12 Breathe, Stretch, Shake Mase, feat. P. Diddy

13 Ice Ice Baby Vanilla Ice

14 Big Pimpin’ JAY-Z, feat. UGK

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16 Super Mario Brothers Koji Kondo

17 She Will Be Loved Maroon 5

18 Bad Boys Inner Circle

19 The Pink Panther Theme Henry Mancini

20 Turn Me On Kevin Lyttle feat. Spragga Benz

Table 3 Nielsen RingScan: Top 10 Mastertones (September 4, 2006–December 31,

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illuminating archetype that demonstrates the particularities of ringtone rap.18 Though

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Table 4 Hot Rap Songs, June 2, 2007

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Table 5 Hot Ringtones Chart, June 2, 2007

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Table 6 Hot Rap Songs, January 3, 2009

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