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Snoop Dogg talks Death Row streaming service

By Andy Malt | Published on Tuesday 19 April 2022

Snoop Dogg has announced plans to launch a new streaming service just for music released by the Death Row record label, which he took full control of earlier this year. This follows the removal of the label’s music from other streaming services once that deal was completed.

Speaking on the latest episode of the ‘Drink Champs’ podcast, the rapper says: “First thing I did was snatch all the music off those platforms traditionally known to people, because those platforms don’t pay. Those platforms get millions of millions of streams, and nobody gets paid other than the record labels”.

Of course, thanks to his Death Row deal, Snoop is now the record label as well as the artist, but he’s still not too pleased with how more conventional streaming services work and how little he earns.

He continues: “So what I wanted to do is snatch my music off, create a platform which is something similar to Amazon, Netflix, Hulu. It’ll be a Death Row app, and the music, in the meantime, will live in the metaverse”.

“Nobody in here can tell you what a stream adds up to”, he says, returning to dissing the Spotifys of this world. “It’s a fraction of a penny. So you can get a hundred million streams and you don’t make a million dollars. So, what the fuck is that? But, you want me to keep giving you my music but somebody making the money and it ain’t me. And I can’t afford to keep doing that”.

“I wanna create an avenue”, he adds, “where I can show people how to not always go through the slave trade but create our own trade where we [are] engaging with our own fans that’s buying our music, that’s making money off of the music, and then’s making us money off of the music by it being traded and sold”.

If you’re a bit confused by all that, well, you haven’t been paying attention. He has already piloted his plan to release music in a way where artists and fans can both make money whenever a track plays via the release of his latest album ‘Bacc On Death Row’.

Put out in partnership with blockchain gaming company Gala Games and its new “decentralised record label” Gala Music, the album was released as 25,000 NFT “stash boxes”, each costing around $5000. Each stash box contains one of the album’s seventeen tracks, and there are extra bonuses for anyone who manages to collect all seventeen by buying and trading the NFTs.

Anyone who holds any of those NFTs also earns a cuts of streaming income for the tracks they are associated with when played on Gala’s own streaming service. This kickback, of course, assumes that anyone actually uses the Gala streaming service. However, it’s possible that a Death Row streaming service might prove a more compelling option.

There were some key catalogue omissions from Snoop Dogg’s Death Row deal. Certain albums are no longer under the control of the label. That includes Tupac Shakur’s ‘All Eyez On Me’ and ‘The Don Killuminati: The 7 Day Theory’, control of which has returned to the Shakur estate. And control of Dr Dre’s 1992 debut solo album ‘The Chronic’ is set to return to him next year.

It remains to be seen if Snoop can do deals to ensure that these albums are also available on his new streaming service. If not, he does still have the label’s two biggest sellers, his own first two albums, 1993’s ‘Doggystyle’ and 1996’s ‘The Doggfather’.