Hi, everyone. Conthony Cernedtano here, the internet's busiest music nerd.

If you are at all a fan of sample-based music, chances are you heard the really big breaking news that came out this past week that the largest database and community of sample-based music enthusiasts, WhoSampled.com has just been fully and completely purchased by none other than music streaming giant Spotify, which obviously obviously is a gigantic concern for a lot of reasons, many of which have already been echoed for quite a long time by different successful producers and DJs.

I'm talking about guys like Nicholas Craven, for example, who've essentially tried to communicate to music fans that while it's really cool to be able to recognize samples and find the source material for this stuff, have conversations about it with friends, other artists, whatever. Posting this stuff up into a widely accessible library for everybody to see and dig into is potentially putting guys like him in legal trouble, who maybe haven't cleared every single sample going into the myriad of obscure hip hop gems he tends to produce every year. So through this, fans are theoretically hurting the very artists and genres of music that they supposedly care so much about.

For a long time, this harm that was allegedly being done was all in the abstract so long as WhoSampled just continued to function as an independent community of sample enthusiasts. But now, WhoSampled no longer functions as that independent community, and has been purchased by a music streaming giant, a platform that has untold connections to the major labels and all of their subsidiaries.

Obviously, these labels make billions of dollars in revenue through streaming services like Spotify. They are also invested in the financial success of Spotify. So I think it's pretty easy to deduce that Spotify isn't exactly going to be secretive with whatever sample information they might have on the back-end through WhoSampled. The labels are going to have easier access to that than they've ever had.

So again, it does seem like these sample snitching nightmares are becoming a reality, which is why we are going to dip into a dialogue with producer, artist, and former WhoSampled.com moderator, Katie, aka "Sgt. Talby," to talk about her experience moderating on the site, what exactly some of those back-end details are, and what influenced her to now quit in the wake of this purchase.

Katie spent the past year inside the machine as one of the people quietly holding the entire site together, one submission at a time. She didn’t get a paycheck, a title, or anything flashy for her efforts. Like the other moderators, she did it because that's what she was into, she loved the culture of sample spotting, loved digging for the obscure stuff.

When Spotify swept in, moderators weren’t given advance notice, direction, or reassurance. They learned about the sale the same moment the rest of the world did, and for someone who makes sample-based music herself, the implications hit different: the archive she helped build could now be used to expose the artists it was meant to celebrate. In her view, WhoSampled has quickly gone from a fan-driven curiosity to a potential enforcement tool backed by companies that profit from content policing and litigation.

That shift is where the fear comes from. Not saying it's paranoia or conspiracy, but there a real possibility that a community built on passion might now be used to shut down the creativity that inspired it. And whether or not that future holds true, that unease is enough to already change the behavior of people who have submitted to WhoSampled for many years.

Watch the full interview here.