Dr Dre: hip-hop’s first billionaire
Entrepreneurial flair has propelled the rap star from Compton to Cupertino
The raucous, celebratory video posted to Instagram a few weeks ago by actor Tyrese Gibson was taken down shortly after it appeared but in the few minutes it was available to view it went viral.
It featured Mr Gibson and hip-hop star Dr Dre at a party, and seems to have been prompted by the news that Dr Dre’s Beats Electronics was being acquired by Apple, revealed by the Financial Times that day. “The Forbes list just changed!” shouts Mr Gibson. “The first billionaire of hip-hop,” adds Dr Dre. “Right here, from the west coast.”
This week it is official. Apple has confirmed it will pay $3bn for Beats, the headphone maker and digital streaming service. Dr Dre and his long-time business partner, Jimmy Iovine, together own about 50 per cent of the company: before the sale, Dr Dre had an estimated net worth of more than $300m, thanks to Beats dividends and a career as a best-selling recording artist and producer. The Apple deal catapults him into what Mr Gibson refers to in the video as “the billionaire boys’ club”.
Aside from American mogul David Geffen, who made a fortune from the sale of his record label to MCA, music billionaires are a rare breed. Even though stars such as Jay-Z and P Diddy have earned vast sums, hip-hop, a genre born only in the late 1970s, has lacked one of its own. Now, in Andre Young – Dr Dre – it has one.
With Mr Iovine, Tim Cook, Apple chief executive, and Eddy Cue, who runs the company’s internet software and services, Dr Dre this week met the FT in Apple’s base in Cupertino, California. Quiet and content to let Mr Iovine do most of the talking, Dr Dre, who will join Apple after the sale in a role yet to be confirmed, says the deal is “a great opportunity ... I can’t wait to get started”.
Cupertino is a far cry from Compton, the crime-ridden district of Los Angeles where the star was raised. Yet it was Compton that shaped Dr Dre and the distinctive bass-heavy sound he pioneered. His approach to music production defined a new era of hip-hop and launched the careers of some of music’s best-selling stars: Snoop Dogg, the late Tupac Shakur, Eminem and 50 Cent were all developed, nurtured and given their first big break by Dr Dre.
He got his first taste of music as a child mixing records at family parties, where George Clinton and his group, Funkadelic, were early personal favourites. He became a professional DJ as a teenager, taking the name Dr Dre from basketball star Julius “Dr J” Irving and joining the World Class Wreckin’ Cru, early exponents of the electro genre, where he took to the stage to mix records in outlandish outfits. But he hit the big time with NWA, the act that propelled gangsta rap – an aggressive form of hip-hop that reflected tough urban life – into the mainstream, rattling the sensibilities of white, middle-class America.
His impact was arguably greater once he had struck out on his own with the 1992 release of his acclaimed album, The Chronic, named after a potent strain of marijuana. “Everybody else was sampling other records but he was the first guy to use live instrumentation and that created a distinctive sound,” says Steve Stoute, the author of The Tanning of America: How Hip-Hop Created a Culture that Rewrote the Rules of the New Economy. “Dre is the Quincy Jones of hip-hop.”
Dre is like the Nasa of hip-hop. He’s showing us the final frontier but we’re just at the beginning
- Pharrell Williams
After extracting himself from the clutches of Suge Knight, his partner in Death Row Records, he formed Aftermath Entertainment, a label he controls, which is a subsidiary of Universal Music’s Interscope Geffen A&M.
He has embraced risk, most notably when he agreed to produce and release Eminem’s 1999 album, The Slim Shady LP. “Before then white rappers were unacceptable and not seen as being authentic,” says Paul Rosenberg, Eminem’s manager and chief executive of Goliath Artists Management. “It was a big risk for him but he changed hip-hop and not just musically ... it shifted the audience.” Eminem became a chart-topping success: thanks to Dr Dre, hip hop was reaching more people.
He has been married for 18 years but his life has not been without tragedy. His younger brother died at a young age, breaking his neck in a fall after he was caught up in a fight. He has several children, one of whom, Andre Young Jr, died six years ago aged 20 from an overdose.
But personal setbacks have never slowed him. Although he still produces new acts, such as rapper Kendrick Lamar, his solo recording career has taken a back seat since 2008. He and Mr Iovine launched Beats headphones that year, conceived as an alternative to the tinny earbuds sold with MP3 players. The brand spawned imitators and established the retail category of premium headphones, which quickly became must-have fashion items coveted by basketball stars and Premier League footballers.
The Beats brand would not have resonated with music fans and young consumers without Dr Dre’s involvement, says rapper Will.i.am. The Apple sale “means that kids have another thing to aim for: technology. Kids want to play music or they want to be sports stars. Now they’re going to want to get into technology.”
The Apple deal gives Dr Dre a unique place in the hip-hop pantheon, according to Grammy-winning rapper, singer and producer Pharrell Williams. “I see the guys who started hip-hop as being like Mount Rushmore,” he says. “But Dre is like the Nasa of hip-hop. He’s showing us the final frontier but we’re just at the beginning ... there’s so much more to explore. He’s knocking down doors for us all.”
Dr Dre’s interest in arts and technology recently led to a $70m gift from him and Mr Iovine to the University of Southern California to establish a degree programme. When the deal is completed he will have even more wealth at his disposal but money has never been the driving force for hip-hop’s first billionaire: music has always come first. “I don’t do it for the money ... that’s going to come,” he said in 2012. “I do it for the love I have for it.”