Snoop Dogg is helping bridge the gap between streaming and monetization for artists with a new major investment.
The legendary rapper and businessman reportedly helped Sound, a Web3 music platform raise $20 million in its latest funding round. Other participating investors included Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), Ashton Kutcher’s Sound Ventures, and Ryan Tedder among others. Past investors also included 21 Savage.
“One of my principles is that talent is equally distributed, and opportunity is not,” Sound Co-Founder David Greenstein said, per an AfroTech report. “It shouldn’t matter where you come from, what you look like, how much money you have – if you are talented and you make music, you should be able to make a career off of being an artist.”
As ESSENCE previously pointed out, noticeably shorter song lengths stem from streaming platforms’ pay per play operating model, in which low streaming music layouts have caused song length to shorten so listeners are encouraged to replay the song more often, thus bumping up the amount artists earn.
Brooklyn White wrote, a platform like Spotify pays major artists between $0.004 and $0.008 per stream, which incentivizes artists to create shorter tracks.
“My philosophy has been ‘meet artists with where they’re at,” Greenstein said.“Ultimately, once they get their music collected and get paid out instantly, that’s the dopamine effect that goes ‘whoa, I just returned 100% of my revenue, this company didn’t take anything from me, and I own the relationship with my artist with with my listeners’ – that is super, super powerful.”