Snoop Dogg has shed light on some of the economics of streaming, revealing how much money he received from his publishing company after achieving one billion streams on Spotify.
During a recent appearance on the Business Untitled podcast, hosts Mel Carter, Mike Novogratz, and David Barry spoke to The Doggfather about his marketing moves.
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At one point, the quartet began discussing NFTs and crypto, with Snoop talking about how his son Cordell brought him into that world.
The “Gin and Juice” rapper discussed how he had plans to help creators sell their art without involving traditional music business middlemen like Apple or Spotify.
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“We went in based on us building relationships with all of these creators in this new space,” Snoop explained. “That gave them the freedom to control the narrative, and not have to pay Apple 30 percent… but to directly get it, sell it, and re-sell it.”
Snoop is the co-founder of Shiller, a live-streaming app that he announced this past March.
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The app uses “web3 technology with live, interactive video and audio streaming to provide a one-stop-shop for creators, including NFT projects, artists, brands and key opinion leaders to monetize their following and connect with their audiences.”
In the context of talking about his own competition to streaming services, Snoop moved on to talking about how much — or in his telling, how little — those services pay.
“In the streaming world, I could show you right now, they sent me some shit from Spotify where I got a billion streams,” he began.
“My publisher hit me. I said, ‘Break that down. How much money is that?’ That shit wasn’t even $45,000.”
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It is unclear from the interview whether Snoop was talking about the entire amount of money he made from the billion streams, or, since he mentioned speaking to his publisher, whether he was referring to just the publishing royalties.
Publishing royalties are divided among all the songwriters, split between the music and lyric sides. These are separate from the recording royalties, which go to the people who own the sound recording.
You can see the segment for yourself, beginning at 31:53.
Elsewhere in the interview, Snoop Dogg revealed just how bad his finances were at one point in his career.
“There were times in my career where it got so bad my accountant was like, ‘We should just do bankruptcy,’” he said. “My pride got involved. Fuck that. If I say bankruptcy then I look like I fucked off everything.
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“They started telling me, ‘Well, this artist did it and this person did it.’ I said, ‘None of them muthafuckas Black! You ain’t name nobody that look like me!’”
He added: “They can do that shit and get back in the game and it won’t look crazy. When we do it, ‘Oh, that n-gga fucked off his money, he ain’t shit.’ So now we gotta start three feet behind the line again.”
