Snoop Dogg announced plans to turn Death Row Records into a non-fungible token (NFT) label in a Clubhouse call on Tuesday, less than a week after taking ownership of the label. "We will be putting out artists through the metaverse and through a whole ‘nother chain of music,” he said, according to audio from the call posted to Youtube. “Just like when we broke the industry when we were the first independent to be major, I want to be the first major in the metaverse.”
The rapper and entrepreneur, who performed alongside Death Row co-founder Dr. Dre and other hip-hop and R&B legends in the Pepsi Super Bowl LVI Halftime Show, has been an advocate for cryptocurrency and blockchain technology since their earliest days in the mainstream discourse. In September, he revealed that he'd collected over $17 million worth of NFTs under the alias Cozomo de' Medici. He also minted several of his own NFTs last year, one of which sold for the equivalent of nearly $750,000 in Ethereum coin. And on Friday, he released 25,000 NFT "stashboxes" of his new album, B.O.D.R. (Back On Death Row), each containing one of the record's 17 songs and priced at $5,000. On Monday, Trapital founder Dan Runcie reported that nearly 9,000 of these boxes had already sold, generating almost $44 million in revenue.