Chapter 76: The Price of the Sample
Monday, January 18, 2016
Michael entered his studio with a cup of hot tea in his hand. The "mini-tour" weekend was over. His muscles still remembered the effort of the concerts at The Echo and Create, but his mind had already moved on.
The live success had been physical validation. Now, he needed global validation.
He sat in front of his MacBook Pro. The screen illuminated the dark room.
He opened the "FUTURE PROJECTS" folder. Inside, there was a file he had been avoiding and desiring in equal measure.
Lucid_Dreams_Demo_v1.
He had downloaded the provisional instrumental days ago: a simple loop of the guitar from Sting's 'Shape of My Heart', with a basic trap beat underneath.
He hit play.
The acoustic guitar, melancholic and arpeggiated, filled his Sennheiser headphones. It was a classic, elegant, sad sound. It was the perfect foundation.
Michael closed his eyes. He knew this song was different.
It didn't require the screams of 'Look At Me!'. It didn't require the monotone apathy of 'Sodium'. It didn't even require the laid-back flow of 'White Iverson'.
'Lucid Dreams' required melody. It required vulnerability. It required him to really sing.
He opened his vocal effects chain in Ableton. He loaded the Auto-Tune plugin.
This time, he didn't configure it to sound robotic like in "Drugs". He adjusted it with surgical precision. Medium "Retune Speed". High "Humanize". He wanted the effect to be soft, almost invisible, like a shiny varnish over rough wood. He wanted it to correct the pitch, but let the pain through.
He got up and entered the recording booth. The space was in absolute silence.
He approached the Neumann microphone.
He needed to get into the right mental state. The original Juice WRLD song was about a devastating romantic breakup. About a girl who broke his heart.
Michael didn't have a girl like that in this universe. Clara had been a pastime. He didn't have a real "ex" here.
But he had a much bigger pain.
He closed his eyes and thought about his past life.
He thought about his room in 2025. About his college friends he would never see again. About his parents, alive and happy in that other timeline, but dead and buried in this one.
That was his "ex". His previous life. The relationship that ended without him wanting it to.
He visualized that loss. The feeling of being awake but paralyzed, knowing you can't go back.
He started humming, searching for the note, letting the Sting melody guide his voice.
'Uhm-uhm-mm, ah...'
The sound came out of his throat, resonant and sad. The Auto-Tune caught the notes, giving it that characteristic melancholic shine.
'No, no, no, no (no, no)...'
Denial. The first stage of grief.
'I still see your shadows in my room...'
He sang the line. He wasn't thinking about a girl. He was thinking about the literal shadows of his parents' house he had just sold. The ghosts of his memory.
'Can't take back the love that I gave you...'
All the effort, all the love he put into his first life, erased.
'It's to the point where I love and I hate you...'
'And I cannot change you, so I must replace you, oh...'
He hated this universe for trapping him. But he had to "replace" his old life with this new one. He had to build an empire on the ashes.
'Easier said than done, I thought you were the one...'
'Listenin' to my heart instead of my head...'
His voice flowed. It was soft, broken, beautiful.
'You found another one, but I am the better one...'
'I won't let you forget me...'
He stopped. Opened his eyes.
The melody was there. The feeling was there. It wasn't an imitation of Juice WRLD. It was his own version of pain, translated into the same universal language of heartbreak.
He was ready to record the full song.
Michael adjusted his headphones. The silence in the booth was absolute, an acoustic void designed to capture the truth.
He felt strange. Normally, his songs were born from a specific emotion: loneliness, rage, apathy. But 'Lucid Dreams' was different. It was a construction. It was a perfect pop song built on a foundation of real pain.
Harris had paid 50,000 dollars for that sample. His financial future depended on this song working. It couldn't fail.
He closed his eyes. He needed to access that dark place again. Not the rage of 'Paris', but the resignation. The feeling of being trapped in a nightmare from which you cannot wake up, but in which you are aware of everything.
He pressed the record button on his DAW remote control.
The Sting sample began to play. Those guitar notes, clean and melancholic, wove a web around him.
Michael approached the Neumann. He started with the melody, humming to find the exact pitch that the Auto-Tune would polish until it turned into crystal.
'Uhm-uhm-mm, ah...'
His voice resonated in his ears, vibrant and sad.
'No, no, no, no (no, no)...'
'No-no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no...'
'No, no, no, no (no, no)...'
The denial. The refusal to accept reality. It was the perfect beginning.
And then, he entered the chorus. The part he knew the world would sing.
'I still see your shadows in my room...'
Singing the line, he didn't visualize an ex-girlfriend. He visualized his old room in 2025. The posters on the wall, the light of his computer, the presence of his parents in the house. Those were the shadows. Ghosts of a life that no longer existed.
'Can't take back the love that I gave you...'
All the effort, all the love he had put into his first life... lost. Erased by a cosmic accident.
'It's to the point where I love and I hate you...'
He hated this universe for trapping him. But he loved the opportunity it gave him to be someone. It was a toxic relationship with reality itself.
'And I cannot change you, so I must replace you, oh...'
That was the key. He couldn't change the past. He had to replace it. He had to build this new empire to fill the hole of the previous one.
'Easier said than done, I thought you were the one...'
'Listenin' to my heart instead of my head (of my head)...'
His voice flowed smoothly, melodically, breaking slightly at the edges, the Auto-Tune capturing those cracks and turning them into sonic textures.
'You found another one, but I am the better one...'
'I won't let you forget me (let you forget me)...'
He finished the chorus. Took a deep breath. The trap beat entered fully, the 808 hitting softly, marking the passage of time.
He entered the verse. Here, the lyrics became more specific, more visual. Michael adapted the feeling to his own narrative of "death and rebirth".
'You left me falling and landing inside my grave...'
'I know that you want me dead...'
To the listener, it was a metaphor for a breakup. To Michael, it was literal. He had landed in the grave of another Michael. Death surrounded him.
'I take meds to make me feel a-okay...'
He thought of the weed. The alcohol. The cigarettes Amy hated. Anything to numb the noise.
'I know it's all in my head...'
'I have these lucid dreams where I can't move a thing...'
This line. He sang it with terrifying helplessness. Sleep paralysis. The feeling of knowing what is going to happen (the price of Ethereum, the future) but being trapped in the present, waiting, unable to speed up time. It was an endless lucid dream.
'Thinking of you in my bed...'
'You were my everything, thoughts of a wedding ring...'
The normal life he wanted. The stability.
'Now I'm just better off dead (uh, uh, uh)...'
The phrase hung in the air. Michael let the silence follow it for a microsecond before the rhythm pushed him forward.
He wasn't acting. He was bleeding. But he was bleeding with a melody so catchy he knew no one could stop listening to it.
The take continued. He was in the zone. He wasn't going to stop. He went straight to the bridge.
Monday, January 18, 2016 (Afternoon)
Michael stepped out of the recording booth, taking off his headphones with a slow movement. The silence of the studio felt heavy, charged with the residual energy of the performance.
He sat in his Herman Miller chair, in front of the bright screen of his MacBook Pro.
He had the takes. The waveforms of his voice, blue and sharp, were aligned on the Ableton screen. He knew, even before listening to them in context, that they were perfect. The emotion was there. The melody was there.
Now, he had to turn that emotion into a product.
He rubbed his hands together and grabbed the mouse. It was time to mix.
This session was fundamentally different from all the previous ones.
When he mixed 'Look At Me!', his goal had been destruction: saturate, distort, break. When he mixed 'Sodium', his goal had been dirt: hide, filter, obscure.
But for 'Lucid Dreams', the goal was clarity.
He wanted this song to sound expensive. He wanted it to sound as if it had been recorded in a ten-million-dollar studio in Los Angeles, not in a spare room in a canyon. He wanted it to sound like radio.
He started with the most important thing: the Sting sample.
The guitar from 'Shape of My Heart' was beautiful, but in the original recording, it had low frequencies that would clash with a modern 808. Michael opened his favorite equalizer, the FabFilter Pro-Q 3.
With the precision of a surgeon, he applied a high-pass filter, cutting everything below 200 Hz. He cleaned up the "mud". Suddenly, the guitar sounded lighter, leaving a huge empty space in the lower part of the frequency spectrum.
That space was for the bass.
Then, he boosted the high frequencies, around 10 kHz. He gave it "air". He made the strumming of the strings shine, as if the guitar were made of crystal.
"Perfect," he muttered.
He moved on to the drums.
The hi-hats had to be crisp, almost surgical. He compressed them so every hit was identical, creating that hypnotic ticking that drove the song forward.
The snare needed to hit in the chest, but without being aggressive. He chose a sample that had a clean "crack" and added a short, dense reverb, giving it a polished and commercial sound.
And then, the 808.
For this song, Michael didn't use distortion. He didn't use tape saturation. He wanted a pure bass. A sine wave bass that was deep, round, and smooth.
He tuned it perfectly to follow the root note of Sting's guitar. When he hit play, the bass didn't "hit"; it enveloped. It was a warm, heavy blanket that supported the whole song.
Finally, the vocals.
Here is where the Neumann microphone proved its worth. The take was pristine.
Michael applied an effects chain designed for modern pop. First, a fast compressor (an 1176 emulator) to catch the volume peaks when he sang louder. Then, a slower compressor (an LA-2A) to smooth out the entire performance, making his voice sound consistent and "in your face" all the time.
The Auto-Tune, set gently, acted like a varnish. It didn't sound robotic; it sounded superhuman. Perfect.
He added space effects. A 1/4 note delay that only activated on the last words of each phrase, filling the silences.
"I still see your shadows in my room (room... room...)".
He listened to the full mix.
He closed his eyes and let himself go.
It didn't sound like SoundCloud. It didn't sound lo-fi.
It sounded like success. It sounded like platinum.
The clarity of the production made the sad lyrics even more penetrating. It was like seeing an open wound through a high-definition microscope. It was beautiful and painful at the same time.
It is the most accessible and pop song he has done.
Michael opened his eyes and looked at the Yamaha monitors. He knew what he had.
'Look At Me!' had given him the street. 'Sodium' had given him the style.
But 'Lucid Dreams'... this song was going to give him the world.
It was a missile guided to number 1 on the charts. It was the song that would make grandmothers hum the melody and kids put it on repeat.
He exported the final mix. Lucid_Dreams_Master_v1.wav.
The file was 40 megabytes. But Michael knew it was worth much more.
It was worth 50,000 dollars. And he was about to make the call to pay them.
Monday, January 18, 2016 (Night)
Michael stared at the final waveform of 'Lucid Dreams' on the screen. It was a perfect blue line, balanced and dense.
At that moment, the isolation bubble of the studio broke. His phone, which he had left on silent on the desk, lit up with an incoming call.
"Shark" Harris.
Michael felt a knot in his stomach. He knew what that call was for. Harris and his contact in New York had been negotiating with Sting's team for weeks.
He answered.
"Harris?"
"Michael," said the lawyer's voice. It sounded different. It didn't sound bored, or condescending. It sounded exhausted, like someone who just got out of a fistfight. "I have news from New York. Attorney Epstein met with Sting's publishing representatives this morning."
Michael sat up straight in his chair. "And? Do we have the sample?"
"Yes... and no," said Harris, letting out a heavy sigh. "They accepted you using the song. They liked the demo. But Michael... they saw us coming. They know you have numbers. They know you have money."
"What is the price?" asked Michael, his voice steady.
"The price is brutal," warned Harris. "It's highway robbery. They want a $50,000 advance for the use of the master. In cash. Now."
Michael blinked. Fifty thousand. That was almost the entirety of his original liquid "Freedom Fund". Although he had made money with the January shows, dropping 50k at once hurt.
"And the royalties?" he asked.
"That's the worst part," said Harris. "They demand 50% of the publishing and songwriting royalties. Forever. For every dollar that song generates on Spotify, on the radio, on YouTube... Sting keeps fifty cents."
Harris paused, waiting for his client's explosion of anger.
"Michael, as your lawyer, I advise you to reject this. Usually, it's 15% or 20%. They are taking half your song. It's extortion. I suggest you change the beat, remove the guitar. It's not worth it."
Michael remained silent, processing the numbers.
Fifty thousand dollars. Half of future earnings.
He looked at his computer screen. He looked at the Lucid_Dreams_Master_v1.wav file.
He knew what Harris didn't know. He knew this song wasn't going to generate thousands of dollars. It was going to generate millions.
If the song generated 10 million dollars in its lifetime, 50% was still 5 million for him.
But if he changed the beat... if he removed that melancholic guitar... the song would lose its soul. It might not be a hit at all.
100% of zero is zero.
And there was something more valuable than money.
This song was his ticket to global fame. It was the song that would put him on the global map, that would give him world tours, sponsorships, and the influence he needed for his empire.
It was a marketing investment.
Michael did the mental calculations. He had enough liquidity thanks to the recent shows and what remained of the house sale. He could afford it.
"Harris," said Michael, his voice calm.
"Tell me you're going to change the beat," begged Harris.
"No," said Michael. "Let's do it."
"What? Michael, it's fifty thousand dollars..."
"It's the cost of doing business with legends," Michael cut him off. "Without that guitar, there is no song. And without that song, there is no next level."
"It's half your work, kid."
"It's half an empire," corrected Michael. "Pay them. Take the money from the operating account. I'll make that 50k back in a week when the song comes out and starts playing all over the world."
Harris was silent for a moment. He was probably shaking his head in his office.
"Alright," Harris said finally. "You're the boss. I'll draft the paperwork and make the transfer first thing tomorrow. But I hope you're right about this hit."
"I am," said Michael. "Prepare the check."
He hung up the phone.
He stared at the screen. He had just spent fifty thousand dollars on a phone call. His hands were shaking slightly.
But the song was his. Legally.
Now only one thing was missing to ensure the investment was worth it. He needed the world not only to hear it. He needed them to see it.