Spotify is back on good terms with Snoop Dogg, as the rapper has returned to the streaming platform following an exit over royalty payments.
Snoop has launched a new, surprise album titled Iz It A Crime?, which is now available to stream via Spotify. Back in March, he said he was moving his work over to blockchain-based streaming service Tune.FM following a dispute with Spotify, after he believed the payout for hitting a billion streams to be too low.
However, Snoop and Spotify managed to patch things up by having an open conversation on how the money flows from its platform to artists. In a new Instagram post promoting his album, Snoop calls a “truce” with Spotify, and also shares an interview clip from an interview on iHeart Radio’s The Breakfast Club, in which he discusses the matter.
“We had a great conversation with the executives,” he begins. “We decided to get in a room and stop talking about each other and talk to each other… The perspective I was speaking from was an artist, so I didn’t have a lot of information, but now, as a record label owner, I have full transparency and understanding which I can relate to my artists, and as an artist, I can understand it better.”
When Snoop called Spotify out earlier this year, a spokesperson said it was “unfortunate to hear that Spotify’s payments didn’t make it through to Snoop”, suggesting the issue lay with rights holders instead.
Spotify has been more open about how it pays artists in recent months. In its Loud & Clear report released in March, Spotify released a video on the matter. In it, it reiterated that it does not pay artists directly, but does pay rights holders. In general, it pays them roughly two thirds of every dollar it makes from music.
Spotify was the highest paying retailer globally in 2024, paying the music industry over $10 billion in total. This was the largest payout in music industry history, and over 10x the contribution of the largest record store at the height of the CD era.
Iz It A Crime? by Snoop Dogg is out now. You can stream or download the album via a number of platforms.
