Dr Dre: The billion dollar man

Apple have just announced that they are to buy Dr Dre’s headphone and music streaming company, ‘Beats’, for three billion dollars -1.8 billion pounds. This move will surely make the boy from Compton, California one of the most powerful players in the global music industry.

Although a superstar rapper himself, Dr Dre -real name Andre Romelle Young- would find his supreme talent in business; first as a producer, nurturing artists such as Eminem, 50 Cent and Snoop dogg and more recently as a business entrepreneur creating a headphone brand which is widely seen as the coolest on the planet.

Dr Dre joins a growing number of African Americans who have taken their genre -hip hop- and turned it into a multibillion dollar industry in which, they the artists have a sizeable stake in the vast profits. Other artists and business entrepreneurs include, Beyonce, Jay Z, Kanye West, P Diddy, and Pharrell, Their Black own record labels such as Uptown Records, Bad Boy Entertainment, La Face Records, Def Jam, and Death Row records have earned millions of dollars.

But before we get carried away, some have argued that whilst the distribution of music wealth among Black artists has dramatically improved since the blaxploitation of the 70’s and 80’s, 90% of the music industry in which Hip Hop thrives is still dominated by six record companies including WEA, MCA Music and Sony.

Still it is unprecedented the growing number of Black artist like Dr Dre who have gone from scribbling on their hip hop sheets, to analysing their bilion dollor business spread sheets, and still looking super cool.

Simon Woolley