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So, for instance, when Kanye sampled Otis Redding on Watch the Throne, music critic Chris Richards probably got it right when he said, “although West’s creation sounded cool, the overriding message was, ‘This cost me a lot of money.’”

Thanks to a corporate and legal system that rappers don’t control, that’s one of the underlying messages of just about any sample today. This is a significant break from the early days of hip hop. As Shocklee explains it, “The reason why we sampled in the beginning was that we couldn’t afford to have a guitar player come in and play on our record. We couldn’t afford to have that horn section…or the string sections. We were like scavengers, going through the garbage bin and finding whatever we could from our old dusty records.” In a complete paradigm shift, today it’s probably less expensive to hire those string sections than to sample them.

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– http://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2013/09/did-the-decline-of-sampling-cause-the-decline-of-political-hip-hop/279791/