Producer Mark Ronson On How Sampling Changed Music

I never had an opinion about mega-producer Mark Ronson either way. Sure, I’d admired his work with Adele, Amy Winehouse and Bruno Mars (just to name a few), but I had never seen him speak much until this TED talk below about how sampling changed music. I must admit that he opened my eyes to a few things about hip hop and pop music that I hadn’t considered before.

First of all, he’s a great DJ as you’ll see what he does with the TED theme and as he matches many of the examples that he plays, but he’s also an articulate person who obviously knows the history of his art.

As he points out, things that seem sacrilegious to someone raised on recording real instruments is commonplace today and, for the most part, it’s not going back the other way any time soon.

Mark really gets into it about 5 minutes in, but I enjoyed the first part as well. Hope you do too.