Rapper Snoop Dogg says he is standing behind striking Hollywood writers and their efforts to get a larger share of streaming revenue for their work.
Speaking at the 2023 Milken Institute Global Conference on May 3, the rapper insisted that there is an awful lot of creative accounting going on in the streaming industry, according to TheWrap.
“Streaming got to get they shit together,” Snoop Dogg exclaimed. “Cuz, I don’t understand how the fuck you get paid offa that shit. Can somebody explain to me how you can get a billion streams and not get a million dollars? That shit don’t make sense to me.”
“I don’t know who the fuck is running the stream industry, if you in here or not?” he told the crowd. “But maybe you need to give us some information on how to fucking track this money down. Because one plus one ain’t adding up to two. That shit don’t add up.”
Snoop Dogg went off the script and went in on streaming, AI and the writers strike 😂😂 pic.twitter.com/7vfl5Cpw1C
— Ahmed/The Ears/IG: BigBizTheGod 🇸🇴 (@big_business_) May 8, 2023
He then said that musicians have the same problem trying to figure out how to track down how much in sales they really earn online. Tracking the sale of CDs, or movie tickets is easy, but streaming seems to be a mystery.
“That’s the main gripe with a lot of us artists is that we do major numbers with streams and this shit but they don’t add up to the money. Like, where the fuck is the money?”
He went on to note that the writers are striking because of streaming.
“It’s being translated and it’s not working for the artist right now and I just want to speak to that. That’s fucked up,” he said. “The writers are striking because streaming. They can’t get paid.”
“I know I’m going off-script right now, but fuck it. This is business. This is a room full of business people and somebody may hear this and be able to do something about it so that way the next artist don’t have to struggle and cry or try to figure out how to get to his money. Because some of these artists are streaming millions and millions and millions and millions of fucking streams and they don’t got no millions of dollars in they pocket.”
The rapper must be doing well enough, of course. He recently told social media fans that he raised the salary for the pot blunt roller he employs to more than $50,000 a year.
But Snoop Dogg is correct in in assessment of the Hollywood writers strike. One of their chief concerns is getting a handle on streaming views and how that can translate into payment for their work.
As Breitbart News reported when the strike was announced, Hollywood writers walked off the job on May 1 after the Writers Guild of America failed to reach a new contract with the major studios. Among the many issues is compensation for streaming media, with the union arguing that writers are getting left out despite the bounty of new shows on services including Netflix, Hulu, Disney+, and HBO Max, and a long list of others.
The first to be affected by the strike were the late-night comedy shows, all of which transitioned to repeats as the strike began.
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