“BBL Drizzy” and the Future of Sampling

This piece originally appeared on July 9, 2024 in Sound Signal, our biweekly newsletter that identifies emerging artists, scenes, and trending tracks, crafted by the world's best writers and curators. Sign up here to never miss our take on what's next in music.

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"BBL Drizzy," the satirical summer jam by comedian King Willonious, has wormed its way into the crevices of our cultural consciousness one spin class at a time. But its success is a unique case study in the ways that AI is weaving into the music industry. Although his bio Instagram bio lists him as an "AI Storyteller," and his page is full of punchy songs aided by AI tools, Willonius wrote the lyrics to "BBL Drizzy" himself. And if he's penning original songs, how exactly did "BBL Drizzy" end up referenced in one of the first AI lawsuits of its kind?

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RIAA is suing programs like Suno and Udio on behalf of labels like Sony Music Entertainment, Warner Records, and Universal Music Group for copyright infringement. In a statement released by the RIAA in late June, the music organization raised concerns with the ethics of training artificial intelligence. “For [these services], the process involved copying decades worth of the world’s most popular sound recordings and then ingesting those copies [to] generate outputs that imitate the qualities of genuine human sound recordings.”

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In a statement released by Udio on X, the software startup didn’t share the specifics on how they train their AI, but the company did share that they are “completely uninterested in reproducing content in our training set, and in fact, have implemented and continue to refine state-of-the-art filters to ensure our model does not reproduce copyrighted works or artists’ voices.”

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Is there an ethical way to credit a sample of a machine-created sample? The sample clearances around the song have been complicated. When Metro Boomin remixed “BBL Drizzy,” releasing it on SoundCloud might have been a loophole to get around copyright laws. Once Drake sampled “BBL Drizzy” on “U My Everything” for Sexyy Red’s album, the sample needed to be licensed. And although anyone can use the production because it is a royalty-free track, the licensing drama only posed more questions. Since Willonious wrote the lyrics himself, he is now credited as a songwriter on “U My Everything,” but the answer is less concrete about how it will handle artists who were used to train the software.

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This lawsuit is definitely one to watch and only prompts more questions. Will the start-ups be forced to be more transparent in their training process? Is AI only acceptable once the labels can profit from it? However the details shake out, it looks like Willonious can officially add “songwriter” to his resume.

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