Champ Medici talks Web3 communities, NFTs, music and gaming

November 8, 2023 Alex Rustok

The Web3 industry has experienced massive growth in recent years, from a niche showing glimpses of the future of the internet to the reality of building that future with the brightest minds and makers. 

The space has also received support from several influential people, including big names from outside of Web3. Two of those people are world-famous rapper and entrepreneur Snoop Dogg and his son Cordell Broadus, also known as Champ Medici.

Over the past year, Broadus and Snoop have been at the forefront of combining Web3 technologies like nonfungible tokens (NFTs), the metaverse and blockchain with the music industry and its large community.

In November 2022, alongside his other Web3-related projects, Snoop Dogg partnered with Billy Ray Cyrus to bridge music communities across genres and blockchain networks with a music NFT drop.

Broadus has been an essential part of bringing his father’s legacy to life in this new era of digital innovation. Cointelegraph sat down with him to understand what goes into bringing a legacy artist and communities into the Web3 space. 

He explained that in 2020, he was introduced to the metaverse, and shortly after that, his father was approached by Crypto.com. When collaborators brought up digital assets and NFTs in the studio, he recalled that no one understood the concept well enough to take it seriously.

“I took it upon myself to really learn it so I could put it in a language that my father could understand, and not just my father, but all of the culture.”

Broadus said he wanted to be a “bridge” to bring people into this space so that they could learn how to digitize their business and not rely only on the methods of the past. He felt a lot of musicians didn’t realize the potential of their unreleased music being, in some ways, equivalent to digital assets.

“People don’t care how big you are, they don’t want to just see you drop your own NFT. They want to see you support the community.” 

When it comes to Snoop himself, Broadus said that his father had to trust his judgment. He recalled urging Snoop “for years” to recreate his first album, Doggystyle, which was released in 1993 by Death Row Records.

He explained that over time, he believed the idea of rereleasing music “just kind of got embedded in [Snoop’s] head, so when the [NFT] idea came, he was super receptive to it.”

However, this was something he and his team understood more clearly after launching a pilot on OpenSea, where Broadus and his team released 250 Snoop songs and sold the stems and the license to those songs.

Broadus and the team started by releasing 500 copies of the single “High” for $500 each. 

“That first day we sold out and made $250,000 from that first single. From there, it was the numbers, and the numbers don’t lie. Then we only did it for 30 days and by the last 30th day, altogether we did $3.5 million,” he recalled.

Related: AI can be a ‘creative amplifier’ — Grammy chief exec Harvey Mason Jr.

Broadus explained how he witnessed many creators buy those songs and stems and turn them into EDM and country songs.

“It was a cool way to watch your community collaborate with the legacy artists like Snoop at a reasonable price because, in a sense, we’re democratizing what collaboration looks like for musicians.”

He said that type of collaboration and creativity wouldn’t have been possible without NFTs and called the experience “uplifting.”

“If I didn’t understand this community and understand this space, that idea would have never taken off.”

This became even more real for Broadus when he attended NFT NYC and experienced firsthand musicians who bought the NFT song stems from the pilot.

“To be able to be out in public in New York and hear like five different artists show me their songs that they bought from our pilot program and just see how happy they were to be able to be on the song with Snoop and other Death Row artists was huge for me. That’s what touched me the most.”

He also recalled a moment at an event by The Sandbox earlier in 2023 where he was in conversations with big “decision-makers” in Web2 and Web3 and realized the importance of their efforts and presence in the space for their wider community. 

“I wanted to make it a priority and take it upon myself to show not just my father but all of the culture and ensure they were in that room because there was no representation. I was probably one of the only black kids in that room, and I wanted to make sure that I could change that.”

Snoop, Broadus and the team behind their endeavors in the space have continued to move with this momentum with their latest venture announced on Nov. 6, Death Row Games, named after the legendary Death Row Records, which Snoop acquired in February 2022.

Death Row Games is building off a new legacy, which was in part constructed by the teams’ gaming-related presence in the Web3 space, including Snoop’s Snoopverse in The Sandbox metaverse and Dr. Bombay with Yuga Labs, among others.

He is bringing into gaming the same lessons he’s learned from bringing his and his father’s legacy into the Web3 space.

“It’s the same ideology and mindset as far as bringing in diverse creators and telling stories from different parts of the world and minority communities.”

Magazine: BitCulture: Fine art on Solana, AI music, podcast + book reviews