WhoSampled: answering music’s most frustrating question

If you’re a music fan, here’s a site that you could lose yourself in for hours.

With sampling (using clips of other people’s songs as part of a new song) commonplace in modern music, London-based WhoSampled is designed to answer that most frustrating of questions: “Where do I recognise that from?”.

Let’s say you want to work out where you’ve heard the hook from Coldplay’s ‘Talk’ before. A quick search of WhoSampled reveals that it’s a sample from Kraftwerk’s ‘Computer Love’. What’s more, it displays a video for each song so you can compare them and links to buy the tracks from popular online music stores.

WhoSampled also keeps track of cover versions, meaning you can easily discover little-known versions of your favourite songs.

Submitting a sample or cover version is easy, with a form to fill in giving the details of the two tracks. You need to do your own work searching for a video of each song. Hopefully this will be semi-automated in the future. Fellow London-based service TubeRadioFM integrates Youtube search into its design so I’m sure it’s something WhoSampled could look at. Currently, video search needs to be done in a separate browser tab/window, meaning much switching around as you paste in the embed codes.

Founded by London-based Nadav Poraz, the site has been under the radar in development for a year. The version that has launched this week is a great start. While there have been databases of sampled and covered songs online before this, WhoSampled’s use of video makes the service more useful as a tool for exploring music.