Snoop Dogg Reveals How Little He Made After Hitting A Billion Streams On Spotify

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Spotify and other streaming apps have revolutionized the way people listen to music, but it’s come at the expense of artists who don’t make the money they used to through traditional sales—a reality that Snoop Dogg highlighted when he revealed how much he made after people listened to his songs a billion times.

There was once a time when you had to actually buy music if you wanted to listen to your favorite artists and tracks on demand, but Spotify and other services have firmly cornered that particular market over the past decade or so.

As things currently stand, 84% of the music industry’s annual revenue comes from streaming, although artists who upload their tunes to those platforms typically receive fractions of a penny whenever their songs are played (the exact amount varies from service to service).

Weird Al recently joked about that reality while filming a video that coincided with the release of Spotify’s eagerly anticipated “Wrapped” roundup, as he said the 80 million streams he racked up over the course of 2023 were enough to get him a nice $12 sandwich.

While that number was probably closer to $35,000, those payouts are usually split between artists, agents, managers, record labels, and other entities, which means musicians usually end up getting a fairly tiny piece of the pie when everything is said and done.

Now, Snoop Dogg has shed some light on that reality, as the hip-hop icon recently appeared on an episode of the Business Untitled podcast and said he “only” received $45,000 after hitting 1 billion streams.

$45K obviously isn’t an insignificant amount of money, especially when you consider the vast majority of that sum was generated by his sizeable back catalog of hits. With that said, it’s still a pretty eye-opening anecdote about just how many listens musicians need to rack up if they want to make serious money on Spotify.