Hardcore and Hardstyle have borrowed from other music since their beginnings. But what happens when an underground culture of samples, bootlegs and free releases meets the increasingly complicated world of music rights?
The history of the Harder Styles is filled with borrowed vocals, melodies, samples and ideas taken from an enormous variety of music. And this genre has always had a slightly complicated relationship with other people’s work.
Way back at the start of the genre, producers were already chopping vocals out of Hip-Hop records, lifting a few seconds of dialogue from films, borrowing recognisable riffs and turning fragments of somebody else’s work into something that suddenly made perfect sense at 180 BPM. Sometimes the original source remained obvious. Sometimes a sample became so deeply associated with a Hardcore record that generations of ravers probably never stopped to wonder where it had originally come from.
And for a very long time, perhaps they didn’t need to.
This was an underground culture built around vinyl, DJ sets, small labels and music circulating through networks considerably smaller than what we have today. Later, Hardstyle inherited much of that same mentality. Bootlegs became festival weapons. Famous vocals were rebuilt around Hardstyle kicks. Producers gave unofficial remixes away for free, uploaded them to SoundCloud or handed them directly to fans.
Some of those records became classics despite never being conventional commercial releases.
In my previous article about Hardstyle going mainstream, I looked at how the genre increasingly crosses into the wider electronic music world, and how familiar mainstream songs can themselves become gateways into Hardstyle through remixes and bootlegs.
This is the other side of that story. Because once Hard Dance starts borrowing from somebody else’s music, another question immediately appears underneath all of it:
Who actually owned the music being borrowed? And, perhaps more importantly, when did we start having to care?
Sampling was hardly unique to Hardcore. Hip-Hop had already turned the sampler into an instrument in its own right, while early electronic music was increasingly built around chopping, looping and recontextualising existing recordings. Hardcore inherited that environment – and then pushed it through distortion, speed and a very different kind of dancefloor.
The connection with Hip-Hop was not even particularly distant. Before becoming one of the defining names of Dutch Hardcore, Paul Elstak had been a Hip-Hop DJ in the late 80’s, and his early work with Holy Noise mixed Hip-Hop and House while already making heavy use of samples. Many other DJ’s, such as Bass-D, were also active in Hip-Hop, and others in the House scene, such as Dano. The same kind of crossover could be found all over early Gabber: producers were taking fragments of Rap records, Funk, Rock, films and whatever else happened to contain a vocal, riff or piece of dialogue that could be made useful in a completely different context.
Chosen Few’s “Name of the DJ” is almost a perfect example of how deep that relationship could go. Released in 1995, the track contains material identified from Roxanne Shanté’s “Big Mama”. The Dark Raver and DJ Gizmo’s “You Got to Believe” similarly borrowed vocals from Lovebug Starski. These were not obscure connections between neighbouring electronic genres. Hardcore was actively reaching into music that, at first glance, belonged to a completely different world. And yet, once those fragments entered a Hardcore record, they could take on an entirely different identity.
A Rap vocal originally sitting inside a completely different groove could suddenly become a command shouted over distorted kickdrums. A sentence from a film could become the defining phrase of a track. A melody written for another audience could be sped up, distorted, repeated and eventually become more familiar to ravers through the Hardcore record than through whatever it originally came from. That process of taking something recognisable and changing its function became deeply embedded in the culture. The source mattered, but so did what the producer managed to turn it into.
By the time Hardstyle started developing its own identity, borrowing was therefore hardly a foreign concept to the Harder Styles. The tempo changed. The production became cleaner. The kickdrums evolved considerably. But the instinct remained familiar: take a vocal, melody or idea people already recognised and rebuild the world around it.
Hardstyle would eventually develop its own particularly visible version of that culture through bootlegs. Famous Pop, Rock and Electronic records were rebuilt for Hardstyle sets, sometimes handed around between DJ’s, sometimes given away to fans and sometimes remaining unofficial tracks that could be heard at festivals for years without ever appearing as a conventional release.
And this is where things start becoming complicated. Because creatively, all of these things can feel closely related. Sampling a Rap vocal, replaying somebody else’s melody, remixing a Pop song and producing a bootleg can all fall under the broad idea of taking existing music and turning it into something new. Legally, however, they are not necessarily the same thing at all. Before looking at what a producer needs permission to use, we first need to answer a deceptively simple question:
What exactly is it that somebody owns when they own a song?
The easiest way to understand music rights is to stop thinking of a song as one single object. In very simplified terms, there are two different things sitting on top of each other. There is the composition: the melody, harmony, lyrics and the underlying musical work that somebody actually wrote. And then there is the recording: one particular recorded version of that composition. The actual performance that ended up on a CD, vinyl record, download or streaming service.
Those two things can have completely different owners. The writers and their publishers may control rights in the composition, while a record label or artist may control the actual master recording. Copyright systems generally recognise those as separate works, which is why using somebody else’s song can become considerably more complicated than simply asking the artist whether they are fine with it. There is another word that appears constantly once we start talking about the composition: publishing. Music publishing deals with the rights attached to the song itself rather than the particular recording of it. A songwriter or composer may work with a publisher that administers some or all of those rights, collects royalties and may be involved when somebody wants to license or adapt the work. In very simplified terms, the label generally sits on the recording side of the equation, while the publisher sits on the composition side. Neither rule is absolute, but it helps explain why clearing one remix can involve completely different companies representing different parts of the same song.
Now let’s imagine, for example, that a Hardstyle producer wants to make a remix of a famous Pop record. If they take the actual vocal directly from the original recording, they are not only using the words and melody somebody wrote. They are also using the specific recording owned by whoever controls that master. If, instead, they bring another singer into the studio and record the exact same vocal themselves, they have avoided using the original master. But the lyrics and melody still did not suddenly become theirs. They are still working with somebody else’s composition.
The same thing happens with melodies. Recreating a famous synth line from scratch is very different from cutting that synth directly out of the original track, but neither necessarily means that there are no rights involved. One may avoid using the original sound recording while still reproducing part of the underlying composition.
This distinction is probably where a lot of confusion around sampling begins.
When somebody says that they “didn’t sample the track” because they replayed the melody themselves, they may be completely correct from a production point of view. No piece of the original audio was copied. Legally, however, that only answers one part of the question. And things become even more complicated once we move from simply replaying material into actually changing it.
A remix is, by definition, built from pre-existing music and transforms it into something new. Copyright law generally treats adaptations and derivative versions as something the rights holder can control, meaning that creating a new version of a song can involve permissions beyond simply reproducing it.
This is where all the terminology that tends to make music rights sound terrifying starts to appear: master rights, publishing rights, mechanical rights, performance rights, neighbouring rights, adaptation rights and, once video enters the picture, synchronization rights as well.
They sound like six completely different legal universes, but in reality, most of them start from that much simpler distinction:
Who owns the music that was written, and who owns the recording that was made from it?
Once that is clear, the next question becomes much easier:
What exactly does a Hardstyle producer need permission for when turning somebody else’s track into a remix, bootleg, cover or sampled record?
The slightly frustrating answer is: it depends on what exactly they are taking.
Picture the initial example again: a producer that wants to turn a famous Pop song into Hardstyle. They love the original vocal, they know everybody in the crowd will recognise it within seconds, and they already have an idea for the moment where that vocal ends and the first kick comes in. There are several ways they could get there, and legally they are all treated differently. The most obvious one is to take the actual vocal recording from the original track. Perhaps they receive the stems, perhaps they isolate it from the released record, or perhaps they simply sample a small fragment.
In that case, they are dealing with both sides of the equation we just discussed. The vocal melody and lyrics form part of the underlying composition, while that particular performance exists on somebody else’s master recording. In the Netherlands, BumaStemra explicitly explains that sampling normally involves permission from the authors or other rightsholders of the musical work and permission from the owner of the master recording, often the record label.
Removing is a similar can of worms. The producer is taking an existing work, changing it and, very often, working directly with material from the original recording. The relevant composition rights therefore have to be dealt with, while use of the original recording brings the master and neighbouring-rights side into the equation as well. BumaStemra treats both sampling and remixing as situations involving an adaptation of the musical work together with use of the recording.
Of course, when a label commissions an official Hardstyle remix, much of that machinery can be happening far away from the producer’s DAW. The producer might simply receive the stems and an agreement saying they are authorised to make the remix. Somewhere behind that relatively simple exchange, however, somebody has had to make sure the people controlling the necessary rights have agreed to it.
That is one of the major differences between an official remix and a bootleg. “Bootleg” is not some special copyright category that gives producers a different set of rules. In the way the word is generally used in dance music, it normally means that the remix exists without that official authorisation. And that distinction has always been particularly important in Hardstyle.
A producer can spend weeks creating a completely original kick, synths and arrangement around a famous vocal. Creatively, almost everything surrounding that vocal may be theirs. But if the centrepiece of the track is still somebody else’s protected recording or composition, all of that original production does not automatically solve the rights question… which can lead into a situation like the one on “Reach For The Sky”, where Adaro & Digital Punk had to change the vocal before release.
Re-recording the material changes the situation, but does not necessarily remove it.
Suppose our producer does not sample the Pop singer at all. Instead, they bring another vocalist into the studio and ask them to sing the same words and melody. There is now a brand-new recording. The original master has not been used, but the composition is still being used.
This is the distinction between a sample and what is often called an interpolation. With a sample, part of the original recording itself is incorporated into the new record. With an interpolation, the relevant part is recreated in a new recording. The latter can therefore avoid the need to license the original master, while rights in the underlying composition may still need to be cleared.
The same applies to a recognisable melody. Playing it again on a different synthesiser may mean the producer no longer needs permission from the owner of the original master, but the rights in the underlying composition remain an issue.
Then there are covers, which introduce another distinction.
A straightforward cover essentially creates a new recording of an existing composition without substantially changing the underlying work. BumaStemra describes this as a version in which little or nothing substantial has been altered. In such cases, the original composers and lyricists remain the rightsholders, and licensing can be handled differently from permission for an adaptation.
But this is where calling every Hardstyle remake a “cover” can become misleading.
Turning a three-minute Pop song into a 160 BPM festival track, restructuring it around drops and climaxes, changing sections of the melody or altering the lyrics can move considerably further away from a simple one-to-one cover. Once the underlying composition itself is being substantially changed, it can become an arrangement or adaptation, for which permission from the original rightsholders may be required. BumaStemra specifically distinguishes these adaptations from straightforward covers and notes that it cannot itself grant permission for such alterations on behalf of the original creators.
Which means that two Hardstyle tracks using exactly the same famous song can sit in very different positions. One producer may have received the original stems and been commissioned to create an official remix. Another may have extracted the vocal and made an unofficial bootleg. A third may have hired a singer to recreate the vocal, avoiding the original master while still using the composition. And another may have recorded an almost faithful cover from scratch.
To somebody hearing them during a festival set, the distinction might barely matter. From a rights perspective, however, the route the producer took to reach that moment can change almost everything.
There is also another important point hidden inside all of this: getting permission is not necessarily the same thing as simply asking the artist whose name is on the record. A singer may not own the master. A producer may have co-writers. A publisher may administer the composition. A label may control the recording. Performers can have neighbouring rights. Depending on the record, there may be several parties with an interest in something that listeners experience as one three-minute song. BumaStemra itself separates the rights it administers for composers, songwriters and publishers from the neighbouring rights associated with performers and record producers.
That helps explain why an unofficial bootleg can sometimes be created in an afternoon while turning exactly the same idea into an official release can take considerably longer.
While making the music may be hard, figuring out who owns what, and getting all of them to agree, is something else entirely.
But what if an artist gives it away for free?
This is probably where the history of Hardstyle becomes particularly interesting. For years, one of the most obvious differences between an official remix and a bootleg was not necessarily what happened inside the DAW, but what happened afterwards. The official remix went through a label, appeared in stores and eventually on streaming services. The bootleg might get uploaded to SoundCloud, offered as a free download, passed around between DJ’s or simply live forever inside festival sets. And somewhere along the way, “free” started feeling almost like its own category.
If nobody was selling the track, perhaps there was nothing to worry about. No money was being made from somebody else’s song. The producer was giving fans something for free, the original artist was getting exposure, and everybody seemed to win. Except copyright does not really work that way…
Giving a bootleg away for free may change the commercial context around it, but it does not automatically give the producer permission to use somebody else’s recording, lyrics or composition. Giving the track away for free is still distributing it. And a bootleg built around an uncleared vocal does not suddenly become authorised simply because there is no price tag attached to it.
If the rights were always there, how did the Harder Styles manage to build such an enormous culture around bootlegs, samples and unofficial remixes in the first place?
Part of the answer may simply be that the environment was completely different. A sample appearing on a limited vinyl pressing in the 1990’s existed in a very different world from a track uploaded to Spotify, YouTube or TikTok today. A bootleg passed between DJ’s or posted as an MP3 on a forum could reach a meaningful audience inside the scene while remaining almost completely invisible to somebody outside it. There was no automated system constantly listening to millions of uploads and comparing them against enormous databases of copyrighted music. And the amount of money surrounding the Harder Styles was considerably smaller.
Back in those days, infringing somebody’s copyright and actually attracting the attention of a rightsholder were two very different things… and as the Harder Styles grew, that gap started becoming much harder to rely on.
What happens when the scene becomes visible?
And perhaps this is where all of this becomes less theoretical. The history of the Harder Styles is filled with records where somebody else’s music became the spark for something completely different. Project One’s “The Story Unfolds” famously uses vocals from Beyoncé’s “Ring the Alarm”. Ran-D, Frequencerz and Adaro built the instantly recognisable melody of “Battleborn” around Kim Wilde’s “Cambodia”. In both cases, the borrowed material became part of records that now belong firmly to Hardstyle history.
What we cannot necessarily establish from the outside is what happened behind the scenes. In the case of “The Story Unfolds”, for example, the source of the vocal is clear. Whether permission was requested, granted, negotiated somewhere privately or handled in some other way is much harder to establish from publicly available information. All we know is that the original writers aren’t credited. And that uncertainty itself says something about the period these records came from.
Other cases are much less ambiguous about the consequences. Atmozfears & Demi Kanon’s “The Humming” became a track people already knew from sets and wanted released, yet Atmozfears publicly referred to rights problems surrounding it. The music existed. The audience existed. The missing piece was everything surrounding the music. The problem got solved when the track got… mysteriously leaked.
“Sutra” shows how those complications do not necessarily end once a record has been released either. The Gostosa classic eventually disappeared from streaming platforms. Scantraxx later explained that the track had originally been licensed, but that the licence expired and the parties could not agree on the terms required to extend it. A record could therefore be legitimately available for years and still eventually become unavailable because the rights arrangement underneath it changed.
On the other hand, the modern scene has also developed ways of turning some ideas that might once have lived permanently as bootlegs into commercially distributed releases. The Purge’s version of “Chase The Sun”, for example, eventually appeared through Savage Squad Covers in 2024, with the public songwriting metadata I could find crediting only Manuel himself. Dirty Workz has its own DWX Covers imprint, which has released Hardstyle versions of existing songs from artists including Da Tweekaz, Hard Driver, Ran-D and others, with many of those releases publicly crediting the original writers. Those releases now sit on the same streaming platforms as any other Hardstyle record, under dedicated cover imprints built specifically around this kind of music. That does not necessarily tell us everything about every agreement sitting behind every release, nor does the existence of a “covers” label automatically answer every possible rights question. But it does show how much the infrastructure around the idea has changed.
There are several other examples: Brennan Heart was already playing a Hard Bass tool based around Jordan & Baker’s Trance classic “Explode” more than a decade ago. In 2024, his name appeared on a commercially released new version of “Explode” alongside Dimitri Vegas & Like Mike, Timmy Trumpet and Darius & Finlay. The creative impulse – hear a melody from somewhere else and imagine what it could become in a harder context – remained remarkably familiar. The route from that impulse to the listener had changed considerably. And amidst all of this, fans still yearn for that original bootleg!
Perhaps this is one of the less visible consequences of the Harder Styles becoming bigger, more professional and more connected to the wider music industry. A producer can still hear a vocal and immediately imagine a kick underneath it. They can hear a melody from twenty years ago and wonder how it would sound at 155 BPM. They can watch a film and hear one sentence that suddenly sounds like the perfect introduction to a track. That part has not changed. What happens afterwards might. The idea may become an official remix if the necessary rightsholders can be found, an agreement can be reached and the artists and labels involved decide it is worth the time and money required to pursue it. The vocal may be re-recorded. The composition may be cleared and released through a covers imprint. It may remain a bootleg played only in sets. It may be given away unofficially, or it may sit on somebody’s hard drive for years.
There is no need to decide whether that development has made the Harder Styles better or worse to acknowledge that it changes which ideas eventually reach us. The scene grew partly inside an environment where borrowing something, transforming it and putting the result in front of an audience could happen remarkably informally. As Hardstyle and Hardcore became larger, more international and more commercially significant, that informality inevitably became harder to maintain…
Which brings this story back to where the previous one started: for years, getting Hardstyle noticed outside its own world felt like an achievement. Mainstages, collaborations, radio plays and millions of streams were signs that a culture which had once existed largely inside its own ecosystem could no longer be ignored. But visibility works both ways. When the rest of the music industry starts paying attention to Hardstyle, the people who own the vocals, melodies and recordings Hardstyle borrows from can pay attention too.
Hardstyle spent decades becoming harder to ignore. Perhaps one of the consequences is that what Hardstyle borrows has become harder to ignore as well – and that the old way of doing things has become much harder to sustain.
