I came up in the 90’s tracker scene. Half my education was opening someone else’s mod file and seeing exactly how they did it. The arrangement, the sample choices, the little tricks. You take a piece of music apart. You sit with a track you love and try to make something that sounds like it. Eventually, piece by piece, you start developing your own ideas about how to do things.
The music you release should be yours, even if its DNA is half-borrowed. The borrowing is fine. What matters is whether you can answer for the choices.
Here’s the trap with plagiarism. You don’t know how or why the decisions got made. You copied the surface. You can do it. But you can’t develop your art that way. The more you do it, the more it will expose that you don’t have the underlying thinking.
You may not be punished for it by the world. But you’re punished by the work itself, which won’t let you grow.
The studio is the perfect place for theft. But the release is the place for what you actually have to say.