“You Get 1 Billion Streams But Don’t Get $1,000,000?” Shaquille O’Neal Echoes Snoop Dogg’s Bewilderment Regarding The Current Music Industry

Snoop Dogg being a Los Angeles Lakers fan automatically translates to him being a fan of Shaquille O’Neal. The ‘Big Aristotle’ and Snoop have even crossed paths in the same industry as the former has been DJing as ‘DJ Diesel’ for years on end now and Snoop, as everybody knows, is one of the greatest hip-hop artists in history. With all the knowledge that Snoop has about the industry from being in it for about 3 decades, he can’t seem to understand how the streaming numbers work in relation to artists getting paid. Seems as though Shaq can’t figure this out either.

When it comes to artists getting paid, Shaq is all too familiar with the exact opposite of this. According to him, he’s never once taken money for his DJ gigs and he does indulge in this activity solely because of the joy het gets from it. Besides, he made his money from the music industry when he was a platinum recording artist in the early to mid 1990s.

Shaquille O’Neal echoes Snoop’s sentiment about how artists get paid less from streams

It was much easier to track the earnings of an artist before the days of monetized streaming came along. Selling more physical records meant more money came in for the label and the artist that was signed to the label.

Now, with a plethora of independent artists hitting the scene and uploading their tracks to Spotify or any other streaming platform, the industry has not adapted to translating artists’ paychecks to the number of streams they get. Snoop Dogg questioned, “You get 1 billion streams but don’t get $1,000,000?” and this clearly resonated with Shaquille O’Neal.

What makes Snoop’s rant a bit confusing is that according to ‘labelgrid’, Spotify allows artists to make between $0.003 and $0.005 per stream with 70% of the earnings going to the rights holders and 30% going to Spotify directly. So, if someone were to get 1 billion streams with each stream charged at $0.005, the total revenue pre-tax would be $5,000,000.

This $5,000,000 is then divided between the rights holders and the platform so the former would get $3,500,000 which is then divided again if the artist is signed to a label. While the artist does indeed not get enough money for accomplishing something as monumental as 1 billion streams, they do receive around $1,000,000 if we were to go off of what ‘labelgrid’ has mentioned.

Shaq and Snoop once had a collab on TNT

Shaq is a man of several talents with one of them being beatboxing. While he isn’t the most talented at the art, he certainly isn’t a novice at it. while on ‘Inside the NBA’, he would team up with guest, Snoop Dogg, to showcase his beatboxing talent.

Snoop being the talented rapper that he is, would go on to freestyle the song ‘Gin and Juice’ over this beat laid down by Shaq on the opening night of ‘Inside the NBA’ in 2017.