The Future of Beat Makers and Creators...

So I'm a fan of Hip-Hop.  That would be the music I identify with.  Growing up I listened to all music from Classical to R&B to Jazz.   As I became older I started breaking down Hip-Hop songs, I listened to and started asking questions about how they make these songs?

                                                 How producers construct a Hip-hop beat

While sifting through my mom's vinyl records I heard a familiar riff to a Hip-Hop song, but it was on this record from a group called Return to Forever.  The Hip-Hop song only used six seconds of the jazz-fusion song.  After having that Eureka! moment, I started playing all my mom's records.

                                             Hip-Hop takes Jazz and makes it very different

Now that hard-to-find records are available via Youtube and torrents the dust, dirty hands and heavy lifting of records is no more.  Crate diggers(searchers of vinyl records to sample or listen) are a slowly fading population.  Now you can find a very rare record online, sample it and create music.  It doesn't need to take a whole day of collecting records, sifting through what to sample and then creating a song, which was a staple of 1990s and early 2000s electronic music producers.

Afrika Bambaataa on his unique record collection in the Cornell Library and the fun of Digging in the Crates

Has this accessibility to music via the internet diminished the art form of digging for records?  Has technology given us easier routes of creating while at the same time making us content on how create?  Take a listen to some creative and some not so creative examples of sampling in current music.