If an artist isn't on Spotify in 2023, do they still exist?

2023 just might be the magic number because, after a years-long legal struggle, the music of iconic rap trio De La Soul will finally launch on streaming services this week.

To unpack the significance of this announcement — including why it took so long to happen — music critic Maura Johnston and former music exec Ian Steaman join host Elamin Abdelmahmoud to dig into how an absence from streaming platforms can affect an artist's legacy.

We've included some highlights below. For the full discussion, listen and follow the Commotion with Elamin Abdelmahmoud podcast, on your favourite podcast player.

Elamin: Ian, I'm going to start with you on this one. For listeners who might not be entirely familiar with De La Soul's legacy, can you tell us a bit about what this group meant to you and why they were so important to the evolution of hip-hop?

Ian: I don't think I would have had a career in hip-hop if it wasn't for De La Soul. They were the group that really opened up that music, even more so than Run-DMC or the Beastie Boys, to everybody — regardless of age, regardless of the music you were into before. They re-embraced the spirit of pushing musical and creative boundaries that hip-hop was always about when it had started. The music had kind of gone through a very peak period of the golden age that people really revere, but it was starting to become almost ossified in terms of, there were tropes and things that were kind of being set in place, you had to look a certain way to be a rapper, you had to say and talk about certain things to be a rapper, and De La Soul kind of broke through all of those things and reopened up the possibilities for the music.

Elamin: Like [they were] from Amityville, they walked around wearing peace signs — it's not what you expected a hip-hop group to be, and they asserted themselves as the new greats in a sense, right?

Ian: That's right, and I think being from Amityville, which is in Long Island, it's very similar to Toronto in a lot of ways — it's a very suburban, open space, people live in houses, they're not in apartment buildings. And I think just that open space and that freedom and that cultural mixing that was going on out there really lent itself to what they were doing.

Elamin: De La's debut album was 1989's 3 Feet High and Rising. It's considered this classic of the genre, thanks in part to the amazing use of sampling, right? The album features 60 samples — anyone from Johnny Cash to Steely Dan to Funkadelic. But in De La's case, the very thing that made them famous — this idea of using samples so creatively — is a thing that also has managed to keep their music offline since the early 2000s. So, Maura, can we just get a little bit into this? Explain why De La Soul's music was held back from the world of digital music for so long.

Maura: Sure. It was a combination of factors. There were obviously sample clearance issues and dealings with music publishers who also have to be contacted in certain cases … and then also the group's relationship with their former label, Tommy Boy, was sort of fraught, so that led to this extended limbo to the point where in 2014, De La Soul put their catalogue online for free download for a day. Finally, in 2021, Tommy Boy was bought by the music company Reservoir Music, and that really sped up the negotiation process. After that, they had to clear all the samples for the records; that took about a year. Not all of them were cleared, so there are some recreations. There's a really great interview with Deborah Mannis-Gardner, and she's the sample clearance person who worked on the De La Soul catalogue. It's really illuminating as far as all the things that a record has to go through to get ready for being released on streaming services.

Elamin: It's a part of the hip-hop industry, but also just the music industry in general that we don't think about enough: the idea that if you're going to use some samples in the way that De La Soul used some samples, you usually have to go through a very rigorous process of clearing those samples. Otherwise, you could be hit with lawsuits, your music could be prevented. But of course, you worked with De La Soul as an A&R person. You can't really get into the specifics of the recording contract, but why do you think it's taken so long? Because this is a beloved group, you'd think that there would be a rush on trying to get this music online.

Ian: It is a very rigorous process. I think I spent as much time working with our business affairs department clearing samples as I did in the studio, making records with the groups. I was the hip-hop A&R guy for Tommy Boy for the better part of a decade — I worked on Naughty By Nature, and I worked on House of Pain and Coolio as well as De La Soul, and it was the same process for all of those records. I can't speak for the first two albums, but from Buhloone Mindstate on, I worked on all of those albums, and we cleared all of those samples. So it was a bit of a mystery to me why De La Soul stuff didn't make it onto streaming whereas all those other groups that I worked with did. But I do know, and this is not me getting into the contracts, but I do know that their contract was worded a little wonky in terms of, like, it didn't take into account possible release platforms. So it only spoke to physical mediums —

Elamin: Like CDs, tapes.

Ian: — whereas within a year of the debacle of their first album and the sample issues that came up around that, the contracts had already started to be worded, but they were literally maybe a year or two too early, and that really kind of caught up with them as the digital age started.

Elamin: If I'm working with the same era of music, A Tribe Called Quest's music has been available for streaming for a long time, and I think there is maybe a deeper relationship with a band like Tribe, because people are a little bit more familiar with their music. Not having access to De La Soul's music for so long, I guess what I'm worried about is, would people stop considering them a part of the hip-hop canon, do you think?

Ian: I think there's going to be a process of kind of rediscovery and reintroduction now that the music is coming back. They're definitely starting a bit on the back foot as far as that goes, though, yeah.

You can listen to the full discussion from today's show on CBC Listen or on our podcast, Commotion with Elamin Abdelmahmoud, available wherever you get your podcasts.

For more stories about the 50th anniversary of hip-hop — including Tom Power's conversations with some of the artists who witnessed and shaped the genre — check out Hip-Hop at 50 here.