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Snoop Dogg, one of the most prominent celebrities in the Web3 space, sat down with CNBC in an interview at the NFT.NYC conference last week. Here’s what he had to say about the current “crypto winter” and the future of NFTs in the music industry.
While these days he’s well-known for his focus on Web3 and particularly NFTs, Snoop Dogg has long been an early adopter. In 2014, he was part of a $50 million investment into Reddit. Then valued at around $500 million, the platform is today valued at $15 billion, according to Pitchbook data.
Snoop co-founded Casa Verde Capital, a venture capital fund that has more than doubled in size since its creation in 2015. His announcement earlier this year of plans to turn Death Row Records into an “NFT label” seems par for the course, given the rap icon’s NFT collection worth over $17 million.
“I know (NFTs) have a great opportunity to be big in music, because sooner or later the labels are going to have to come on in,” Snoop says in his recent interview with CNBC. “They’re going to have to come on home and sit at the table and understand that catalogs and things they hold onto are better served on the blockchain than sitting in the catalog collecting cobwebs.”
“And it’s not just labels,” adds his son, Cordell Broadus, also known as Champ Medici — Snoop revealed himself as Cozomo Medici, a previously anonymous NFT art collector, back in September. “It’s movie studios, it’s tech companies, it’s beverage companies… everybody’s rushing to Web3 and they see how big Dogg is in the space.”
“I feel like every great industry has a downfall,” Snoop Dogg says of the current crypto crash and whether he was concerned. “There’s been a depression in every industry you can look at: alcohol, tobacco, clothing, food; every industry you can imagine.”
The recent downturn in crypto gains has been dubbed broadly as the latest “crypto winter,” indicating a period in which crypto prices fall and maintain that low for an extended time. Some leaders in the space expect a “period of creative destruction,” wiping out many players in the crypto zeitgeist. Billionaire Mark Cuban, a massive investor in blockchain-based technology, compared the crash to “the lull that the internet went through during the dotcom bubble” and expressed that the space is oversaturated in “imitators.” Snoop’s view is similar.
“This weeded out all the people who weren’t supposed to be in the space and who were abusing the opportunities that were there,” he says. “Now it’s going to bring on great business, and moving forward, when the market comes back, there will only be great things to pick and choose from,” Snoop concludes.
The rapper’s latest crypto project is a collaboration with Food Fighters Universe (FFU), the world’s self-proclaimed first NFT restaurant group. Snoop’s brand, Dr. Bombay’s Sweet Exploration, is expected to open in LA under the FFU umbrella and utilizes his Bored Ape Yacht Club (BAYC) NFT avatar as its mascot.