Snoop Dogg has officially brought Death Row's catalog to TikTok — a big move since he removed it from streaming services when he acquired it last year.
While Dr. Dre's landmark album The Chronic made a triumphant return to streaming licensed to Interscope Records, in honor of the album’s 30th anniversary, the SoundOn deal marks the remainder of the Death Row catalog’s first official online release since it was pulled from streamers in February 2022, Billboard reports.
Snoop says he was interested in the deal because fans were demanding it. “Since I took Death Row off streaming almost a year ago, not a day goes by without people asking me to put it back up,” the Long Beach mogul said in a statement. “As the Super Bowl rolled around, I knew fans would be looking for the music from our iconic performance in 2022, so I wanted to reintroduce the most historic catalog to the people.”
Here's the catch though — TikTok's SoundOn distribution and marketing service will only have the catalog exclusively for one week. Not to fret, however. Snoop did say that Death Row's releases, including Doggystyle, 2Pac's All Eyez On Me, Tha Dogg Pound's Dogg Food, and more, “will be back on streaming services real soon.”
He explained why he pulled the Death Row catalog from streaming services pretty much immediately after he acquired it in an interview with Drink Champs.
“First thing I did was snatch all the music off those platforms traditionally known to people because those platforms don’t pay,” he said. “And those platforms get millions of millions of streams, and nobody gets paid other than the record labels. So what I wanted to do is snatch my music off, create a platform similar to Amazon, Netflix, Hulu. It’ll be a Death Row app, and the music, in the meantime, will live in the metaverse.”
While no official date has been offered for the catalog's official return to streaming or when Snoop's platform will be ready for the public, we do know that his collaborative album with Dr. Dre is coming sometime this summer.