He contacts the copyright holder of the underlying musical work and gets a mechanical license to use all or part of The Police’s song in his composition.
He cannot, however, purchase The Police’s Greatest Hits, take the CD (or MP3 from iTunes) into the studio, pull the track off of the phonorecord, and sample the riff into his new song.
The musician must serve the copyright owner a Notice of Intent (NOI) to obtain a compulsory license to distribute non-digital media of the recording.
[5] The idea of mechanical licenses came about shortly after the turn of the 20th century, with the popularity of player pianos, with the ability to play songs encoded on a roll of paper.
Songwriters lobbied to the United States Congress following the ruling, and succeeded in establishing the nature of mechanical licenses in the Copyright Act of 1909.
[1] Since then, the nature of copyright law with respect to mechanical licenses have been continually updated to include new types of phonorecords mediums and recordings.
The Office continues to accept notices of intention for non-digital phonorecord deliveries (e.g., for CDs, vinyl records, tapes, and other physical media).