US rapper, songwriter and entrepreneur Snoop Dogg has acquired Death Row Records, the label that released the hip-hop star’s 1993 hit debut album, Doggystyle.
Death Row Records was founded in 1992 by Dr Dre, Suge Knight, the DOC and Dick Griffey. Snoop Dogg was signed after one of his early mixtapes captured the ear of NWA co-founder Dre, who invited him to an audition and then appear on his own debut record, 1992's The Chronic.
Both debut records went multi-platform and helped Death Row on its way to becoming a multi-million dollar business. Doggystyle was followed by Tha Doggfather in 1996, however Snoop Dogg left the label two years later after a row about the terms of his contract and the alleged withholding of royalty payments.
Death Row began to decline in the late 90s after the death of one of its stars Tupac Shakur, and the imprisonment of Suge Knight, as well as the departures of Snoop Dogg and Dr Dre.
Controversy surrounded the label in the early 2000s before it filed for bankruptcy in 2006 and was auctioned to WIDEawake Entertainment for $18m (£13.2m) in 2009. It was later sold to Entertainment One, after the owner of WIDEawake went bankrupt in 2012, and then became a division of Hasbro, until last year when One Music was sold to The Blackstone Group.
Snoop Dogg said the move was an "extremely meaningful moment for me" and he was looking forward to "building the next chapter" of the record label.
"I am thrilled and appreciative of the opportunity to acquire the iconic and culturally significant Death Row Records brand, which has immense untapped future value," he said in a statement. "It feels good to have ownership of the label I was part of at the beginning of my career and as one of the founding members.”