Something I have been thinking about, in terms of cultural heritage, and the kinds of things we take care of here at the Smithsonian, and how they might become more useful to you, is sampling. DJ and Producer Mark Ronson talks about music in terms of a “post sampling era:"

We live in a post sampling era. We take the things that we love and we build upon them. That's just how it goes.

When we add something significant and original, and we merge our musical journey with this, then we have a chance to be part of the evolution of that music that we love and be linked with it once it becomes something new again.

Check out Mark's full Ted Talk here.

Later, Mark reflects more, in an interview with NPR, titled “Why Would More Than 500 Artists Sample The Same Song?“:

I see young producers today, kids who are 19, 20; they stay up all night just sampling straight from YouTube. I think things like YouTube kind of have made a lot of today's younger generation think that, “Well, everything kind of just belongs to us, right?" Because it kind of does: Music has been free for a long time now, for better or for worse.

In some ways, the culture of today is really just about taking whatever you feel like and making it your own. Which is dangerous — there are troubled lines there — because at the end of the day, credit needs to go to the people that created the stuff in the first place. But it does make for some incredible, exciting art. And it does mean that some little kid sitting in his basement in Ohio with a laptop can be making some of the most interesting music around.