The title of the Rolling Stone story on the subject says it all: “For Just $5,000 You Can Own One Snoop Dogg Song on the Blockchain.” Known for being an early adopter of new technology and a rebel without pause, artist-slash-entrepreneur Snoop Dogg has entered the metaverse.
In partnership with Gala Games, a blockchain gaming platform, Snoop is making his newest album available through blockchain tech. The NFT version of the B.O.D.R. (Back on Death Row) LP includes three exclusive bonus tracks. Gala Music sold a limited number of “Snoop Stash Boxes,” each containing one of the 17 NFT tracks from B.O.D.R. There were only 25,000 Stash Boxes available and, for each song on the album, there were only 1,470 NFTs minted. Each of these Stash Boxes sold for $5,000. The non-NFT version of B.O.D.R. came out shortly after the Stash Box sale period ended.
On top of all this, the Dogg also found the time to acquire the label on which he made his musical debut, Death Row Records, then moved it into the metaverse. As reported in Fortune, Snoop Dogg intends to make Death Row, of which he is a founding member along with Dr. Dre and Suge Knight, the world’s first NFT music label. Social media platform Clubhouse was where the announcement came out.
Comparing the venture to when the label was a pioneer in bringing independent artists into the majors, Snoop Dogg says the label will now be a pioneer in distributing artists’ work through the metaverse.
Snoop Dogg is no newcomer to the world of NFTs. Under the alias Cozomo de’ Medici (Snoop’s given name, incidentally, is Calvin Broadus Jr.), he’d begun collecting NFTs and had, by that announcement, amassed around $17 million worth. He released his own NFT collection as well in March 2021, featuring Snoop Dogge Coins and an original song called “NFT.” One of the first NFT sales Snoop made occurred in April 2021 during his “Journey of the Dogg” auction, when a one-of-a-kind work of digital art named, aptly, “Death Row” sold for more than $100,000.
Snoop also worked with the digital artist known for the Nyan Cat meme to put out a “Nyan Dogg” NFT. Near the end of ‘21, he minted an NFT that sold for almost three-quarters of a million dollars.
Snoop is no newcomer, either, to disruptive technology, coming up with his own branded competitor to Instagram before Instagram was a big deal. He called it “Snoopify,” and it allowed users to edit and share photos with special stickers added inspired by the artist himself. He was also an early investor in Reddit, making a $50 million investment in 2014 into a company that, by August 2021, was worth $10 billion.
In a press release about Snoop Dogg’s latest venture, releasing his newest album in NFT form, he pointed out, “If anything is constant, it’s that the music industry will always be changing… and we’re going to be right at the front of the pack.”
