Some of our favorite old-school rap albums have returned.
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On Friday (March 10), Snoop Dogg re-added albums that belong to Death Row Records back to digital streaming platforms. These albums include his 1990s classics Tha Doggfather and Doggystyle, as well as Dr. Dre’s The Chronic and Dogg Food by Kurupt and Daz Dillinger’s duo Tha Dogg Pound.
This re-addition to Spotify and Apple Music comes practically a year after Snoop had the albums removed from DSPs. At the time, he explained that the platforms were not paying enough and he hoped to make the albums available as NFTs in the metaverse and eventually on a potential Death Row app.
“First thing I did was snatch all the music off those platforms traditionally known to people because those platforms don’t pay,” he said during an April 2022 interview on the Drink Champs podcast. “And those platforms get millions and millions of streams, and nobody gets paid other than the record labels. So what I wanted to do is snatch my music off, create a platform similar to Amazon, Netflix, Hulu. It’ll be a Death Row app, and the music, in the meantime, will live in the metaverse.”
That plan has not come to fruition yet. But, this new development comes just one day after Snoop inked a deal with gamma, a new music discovery platform that aims to rival TikTok and uplift Black artists. Larry Jackson, former Apple executive and founder of gamma, signed Snoop to a deal that will see Snoop release two new solo albums and distribute the already existing Death Row catalog in partnership with Apple.
It’s unclear if one of the two impending Snoop Dogg albums will be his collaborative effort with Dr. Dre titled Missionary, which was meant to release in November 2022. But, it seems with each announcement, Snoop christens it with an album. In Summer 2021, he started a new gig as Executive Creative and Strategic Consultant at Def Jam and simultaneously released his compilation album Algorithm. Then in February 2022 when he acquired Death Row Records, he accompanied the occasion with a new project BODR (Bacc on Death Row).
Ultimately, it seems Snoop Dogg just wants the best for the record label that helped launch his career decades ago. Additionally, he just wants his fans to have access to his music. So, this week appears to have been an overwhelming success in both those categories.
(Photo by Sarah Morris/Getty Images)
