Snoop Dogg claims he only get paid $45,000 for 1 billion streams, but is this true? The answer is maybe, but that’s because of his record label and not Spotify. 1 billion streams is typically worth about $3 Million. Watch this video to learn more.
Automatic Transcript (may have errors):
00:00 So I came across this interesting article where Snoop Dogg is talking about how he's getting away from Spotify and going into this crypto NFT platform.
00:08 And the reasoning was that he's arguing that he got paid a billion streams and only made $45,000, which he said here.
00:17 and I'm here to kind of go over one, if this is true, and two, what the actual situation is, uh, because it's, it's not.
00:28 True. I'd even Spotify came out and said, um, you know, it's unfortunate to hear that Spotify's payments didn't make it through to Snoop, because the reality is 40, like a billion streams is worth way more than $45,000.
00:39 So, like this particular problem is not a Spotify problem. There's plenty of things to complain about when it comes to Spotify and really just all streaming services.
00:48 A lot of times people say Spotify, they mean all of them. And that's what I mean here when I say Spotify.
00:53 But let's go over what the math says because I want to kind of go over what this is and then how this can actually happen.
01:00 And I'm not a music royalty like expert. I don't really ins and outs everything, but I have a pretty solid understanding of how it works.
01:06 So let's go through some quick math, right? So we're going to go on a spreadsheet. Don't worry. The math here is quite simple.
01:12 Um, I said, okay, we got a billion streams, right? We got thousands or rather Thousands here, right? This would be 1000.
01:19 Those are one here, one million if there was a one here and one billion here. So this is one billion, right?
01:24 One billion streams. Typically streaming pays a third of a penny per stream, which is 0.00333, right? 0.0333. So per dollars, right?
01:36 0.00333, which is a third of a penny, right? If there was a one here, that would be a penny, but it's 0.3, so it's a third of a penny.
01:46 And so essentially, this math equation here is just 1 billion times that number, a third of a penny. And what that gets you is 3.333333, right?
01:57 Essentially 3.3 million dollars. So, Snoop saying that, uh, was 1 billion streams generated 45 grand, maybe that's what he actually got.
02:08 I'm not saying that Snoop's lie in here, right? It's just that that's not what was generated in the royalties. 3.3 million dollars was generated in moralities.
02:17 It's very likely that the entire entirety of the situation is just really that, um, whatever deal Snoop has with his label, distribution partners, managers write all these entities take a cut where, you know, for example, his label.
02:33 Depending on what deal you negotiate, and it might be different for different songs, he might only be getting 50% of the royalties, or he might only be getting 20% of the royalties, or might only be getting 10% of the royalties, depending on the individual deal he signed at the time.
02:46 Chances are his older catalog is probably at a worse deal, and then as he got bigger and bigger and bigger and had more negotiating power, his deal got better and better and better for newer music that he was releasing, but it's not unusual for an artist to Uh, really get nothing at the end of the day
03:02 if, if the deal was bad or get very, very little. But the 1 billion streams generated someone on his team made 3.3 million, right?
03:10 It's not just the label leader, right? The distributor might be charging a percentage. It could be from 10 to 20%.
03:15 The manager could be just likely charging a percentage anywhere from 10 to 25%. Uh, there's all these different entities that can exist and kind of share the revenue pool, so.
03:25 Some, the whole of team, of Snoop's team, label and all those other people included, should have gotten about $3.3 million for the one billion.
03:35 Streams. And this number isn't from Spotify, right? This third of a penny, things not from Spotify. I've calculated this from multiple distributors.
03:40 So I'm done it from district. I've done it for a muse. I've done it for a melladist. I've done it for the orchard.
03:45 I've done it for a CD baby. And, and this is the average, right? This is what I'm actually seeing come to my bank account at the end of the day on average per stream, depending on the countries and all that stuff.
03:56 Um, 3.3 million. Now, the interesting thing in this article I noted is that he said, my publisher hit me. I said, break that down.
04:03 How much money is that? My publisher hit me. Publisher is the key word here. Um, you know, I'm assuming Snoop's a savvy dude, right?
04:15 He's been in the music industry a long time, but, um, and this could just be a miss bike. I don't want to like o********** words here, but I'm wondering if this is another realm where, uh, he was talking to the wrong person, for example, because he's your publisher, typically they're dealing with like
04:30 the publishing side of your Realty collection, not necessarily the distributor royalties, right? If you upload your music to district and they pay you $1,000, you didn't, like that's not all your money, right?
04:42 And some people don't know this, but that's like the sales of your music from streaming. You also have publishing royalties, which can come from performance royalties and mechanical royalties.
04:52 And that is typically, like typically out of the whole pie, your sales from your distributor is about 85%, and then the other 15% of your royalties come from Uh, the publishing side, the basically what's what's allocated for like the composition or the songwriting on the actual track, right?
05:10 It's not, it's not the same. And to, if we, and that, I calculated here, I don't know if this is exactly correct.
05:15 Again, it depends on individual deals. And if he's not the sole songwriter that gets subdivided, but let's assume that Snoop Dogg's on that billion streams, he was 100% of the songwriter, which is probably not.
05:25 Um, that's, that takes this $3.3 million down to, you know, about $600,000. Or let's just call it a half a million, make it easy.
05:34 So half a million dollars in publishing is assuming he's the 100% songwriter. You can see how, let's say he's only a third the songwriter on average, right?
05:42 This instantly gets from 600K to 200K. And then, uh, they're typically in publishing, there's two sides. There's the songwriter half and then there's the actual publisher half.
05:53 So now we're 200K to 100K. And then compounding the fact that a lot of publishing royalties are severely delayed. Like, sometimes a definitely at least a quarter behind, sometimes multiple quarters behind.
06:06 Um, you can see how maybe it's possible that this is just his share of the publishing royalties. Uh, and this might actually make sense if for Snoop Dogg, if he has like really bad label deals for a lot of his biggest songs, that he's getting almost nothing.
06:24 From the recording side because the record label owns owns the master and maybe he has a very bad deal. So maybe all of his revenue or most of his revenue is coming from the publishing side.
06:34 And then based on how many songwriters there are and based on the deal he has with his publishing administration, um, you could see how maybe 45,000 is actually what hits him at the end of the day.
06:44 So I don't know for a fact if like snoops mixing up that moral tease with this world tease accidentally or intentionally.
06:51 But you can kind of see, like, we just did that subdivision, we got down to $100,000, which is not too far off from the 45k that he set.
07:00 So I'm wondering if that's honestly just the whole problem here. Uh, now, he's doing this because he's talking about this platform 2NFM that he's partnering with.
07:08 And this video is not about 2NFM, but, you know, I first read this and I was like, oh god. Like, another, Crypto blockchain NFT platform.
07:17 I thought we were past this And I think some of that technology has some very cool applications and stuff but like it's just scares me and I see them because of all the platforms that have come and then just vanished after the crypto crash of like 2022 But I check out this one.
07:31 So this is what he's apparently switching to I'm very hesitant with any of these things You know, they're talking about how they want to have a super fan collectible marketplace.
07:41 They're gonna they have this app Um, and they're gonna pay artists per second of music consumption, and they're gonna pay on average ten times more here.
07:50 Right, so Spotify they're rounding up and calling it a fourth of a penny, or sorry, four tenths of a penny, and they're saying they're gonna pay four cents per stream.
07:58 You know, I don't know if this is true. There was another platform I used in the past called Audius, which was like another crypto streaming platform that promised better royalties.
08:07 And I got thousands of streams in the platform literally made not a single penny. And they people were talking about how they're going to be ethical more ethical and paying artists better.
08:15 Literally not a single penny for thousands and thousands of streams because that they they actually didn't ever have a monetization model at least at the time.
08:22 I don't it's been a couple of years, but you know, so this is that's that's the platform he's switching to.
08:28 Uh, and maybe it'll turn out good. Maybe it's an awesome platform and I'll probably check it out at some point in the future.
08:33 But it makes me nervous when there's so many just easily disputable Things with this, right? Saying, I made $45,000 off of billion streams, therefore Spotify is the problem.
08:48 It's just flat out not true. If we're going to attack Spotify on things that are doing wrong, they should be things they're actually doing wrong.
08:55 And I'm all for that. What we shouldn't do is make up fake numbers and say, oh, a billion streams is worth $45,000.
09:06 And then start complaining about it and then switching platforms and doing things because of that, because it's based on a lie.
09:11 And I've seen after, because this isn't brand new, um, maybe this article is fairly new, March 3rd, but he's talked about this further in the past before, because I've seen people repeat this online that a billion streams is only worth $45,000, therefore the streaming rate is actually much different
09:28 than it is. And if you were to say $45,000 divided by one, Thousand? Billion? Billion. And then we get that and put it in dollars.
09:42 Like this is essentially what Snoop and a lot of people repeating what he says they're saying, that they're getting paid this ridiculous, I, you know, can't even count the zeros.
09:52 This should be a tenth of a penny, a hundredth of a penny, four thousandths of a penny, or a half of a thousandth of a penny, um, which is way less than what this is paying, right?
10:02 We can do math on this, this divided by this. And then put that into a percentage. Uh, he's saying the royalty rate is 100 times less than what it actually is.
10:11 So again, I hate when I have to defend a giant tech corporation worth billions of dollars, because that's not my jam.
10:18 I just want us to critique the things that are worth critiquing and stop spreading nonsense and lies. So anyways, no shade of Snoop Dogg.
10:27 Uh, he's a legend and all that. But I think this is a feeling of, uh, one Crazy label deals, legacy label structures, and all that stuff going awry, to the ridiculously overcomplicated nature of the music industry and the royalties, making it very easy for artists to not actually understand what they're
10:46 getting paid. And honestly, I'm so involved in all this stuff, sometimes I struggle with the royalty system, too. And never mind if you're just an indie artist getting this with the frame.
10:54 We all understand it's complicated, and we're due for a radical shakeup of things. Who knows if 2.0 FM is it or not?
11:01 But we're due for some type of radical transformation of of how things are done because it's kind of archaic right now.
11:07 Anyways, this is a more newsy thing. If you want to see more of what I typically do, then check out this playlist right here where I go through how to mark your music on streaming platforms like Spotify, but also others.
11:16 And if you want to see whatever YouTube thinks you should watch, check out this video right here. Anyways, thanks for watching.
11:20 Hope you enjoyed. And I'll see you next video. Bye.
