Now the group is re-emerging with new music after 12 years, during which the genre has gone through sonic and aesthetic revolutions: Hip-hop has become a top-performing genre on streaming music sites, and the internet has helped coronate a new crop of blockbuster rappers. Along with the Bomb Squad’s collaborations with Public Enemy and the Dust Brothers’ production for the Beastie Boys, its work with the producer Prince Paul resulted in some of hip-hop’s pioneering sounds, establishing the melodic and harmonic possibilities of sampling. In its third decade as a group, De La Soul is in a special position. “It was allowing something to happen organically.” “When these guys from the Ohio Players to Parliament-Funkadelic were just jamming, that’s where the songs came from,” Mr. Jolicoeur said he had learned that a similar, freewheeling approach often led to the kinds of sounds the group had sampled in the past. It wasn’t really about a concept of the song it was about, out of nowhere: ‘I play trumpet. “This is about a person selflessly giving everything they could to make something cool or new or fun or better happen,” he said. Jolicoeur said, represented part of the collaborative process. It was because those six albums have never been available to buy digitally or to stream. The attention wasn’t just because the group was giving its catalog away.

They also attracted the attention of Warner Music, which has owned those records since 2002, when it acquired the catalog of Tommy Boy Records, a pioneering indie hip-hop label. The links were available for a day, and the group says the response overloaded the servers hosting the music files.

Those albums - including its 1989 debut, “3 Feet High and Rising,” a platinum record in the Library of Congress’s National Recording Registry - are some of the genre’s most influential and sonically adventurous, threading samples from obscure, kitschy records alongside recognizable pop, jazz and funk hooks. On Valentine’s Day in 2014, De La Soul did something surprising: The group gave away almost all of its work.Īfter gathering fans’ email addresses in an online call-out, this hip-hop trio from Long Island sent out links to zip files for its first six albums.

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