Pitchfork reports on an exchange initiated by Erykah Badu on Twitter, seeking last-minute clearance for a sample from the Wings song "Arrow Through Me." Looking to connect with Paul McCartney, she appealed to anyone who might help connect her to him or a closer contact in the chain.
Following the stream of tweets, it looks like Badu got a hookup to Lenny Kravitz, who knows McCartney's daughter Stella, who then connected her to Paul. He approved the sample clearance and she thanked her "Twitter fam" for making the clearance come together.
As Tears for Fears' Curt Smith talked about in our recent interview, usually this process involves lots of lawyers and in-betweens and can often be drawn out for weeks if not months of back and forth. In another excellent example of how social media can be used to disintermediate the music industry status quo, Twitter made sample clearance a collaborative and rapid process by putting two artists into direct contact.