“I was going to remaster my album,” Snoop Dogg said of his debut 1993 album Doggystyle, crediting Taylor Swift for inspiring the potential remasteris teasing fans with a potential “Snoop’s Version” of some his greatest hits.
The 17-time Grammy Award nominee, 50, credited Taylor Swift for almost inspiring him to remaster his 1993 debut studio album Doggystyle as he appeared Wednesday on the Full Send Podcast.
“She ain’t an old artist at all. She’s quite new. What did she do? She remastered her album,” he said. “Why? Because she wasn’t making revenues off that album.”
RELATED: Snoop Dogg ‘Thrilled’ to Be Owner of Death Row Records, the Label That Launched His Career
“Why did she redo her album? Because she couldn’t get finances, so she redid her album as a way of, ‘I’ll make this for my fans, and they’ll support me, because those are my vocals, and this is my music. I should be making money off of my project when you buy it,” Snoop added.
He recounted a conversation with one of his sons about potentially revisiting his early work but explained that Doggystyle is not the kind of album that can be remastered with the same quality as the original.
“I was going to remaster my album. My son had told me years ago, he was like, ‘You should just remaster Doggystyle, pops, f— all that. Just remaster it, you ain’t gotta worry about all that,'” Snoop recounted. “But I didn’t wanna go [with] that approach, because you can’t remaster Doggystyle like you can remaster them R&B songs. That s— was a feeling, that s— was a moment.”
“You can’t recapture that with trying to reenact that s— all over again, so I had to go get my s— back, but some artists do make better sense for them to just say, ‘F— it, I’m going to remaster my s—.’ Cause after seven years, in case you artists don’t know, there’s a seven-year clause where you can remaster your album and get the ownership back,” he continued.
Snoop previously bought Death Row Records in February, nearly 30 years after he released Doggystyle through the label. The following month, he removed all Death Row releases from digital streaming platforms and announced plans to launch his own unique streaming service where the label’s music will be available to purchase as NFTs, per Billboard.
“First thing I did was snatch all the music off those platforms traditionally known to people, because those platforms don’t pay,” Snoop recently told the Drink Champs podcast. “And those platforms get millions and millions and millions of streams and nobody gets paid other than the record labels. So what I wanted to do was snatch my music off, create a platform which is something sort of similar to Amazon, Netflix, Hulu. It’ll be a Death Row app. And then the music, in the meantime, will live in the metaverse.”
Swift announced in Aug. 2019 that she was planning to re-record her first six albums, after Scooter Braun bought her former label Big Machine for $300 million, acquiring the masters to her discography. Swift previously claimed she was never given the chance to buy them back herself.
“Some fun facts about today’s news: I learned about Scooter Braun’s purchase of my masters as it was announced to the world,” Swift wrote in a Tumblr post at the time. “All I could think about was the incessant, manipulative bullying I’ve received at his hands for years.” (Braun has since sold Swift’s masters for more than $300 million, Variety previously reported.)
The 11-time Grammy Award winner has since dropped the “Taylor’s Version” of Fearless and Red, both featuring never-released “From the Vault” songs that didn’t make it onto the original albums.
Elsewhere in Snoop’s interview with the Full Send Podcast, he clarified his comments are not meant as shade toward Braun. “I ain’t firing shots at nobody. Scooter’s my friend,” he said. “I’m just giving the truth, like, this is public information.”
