Dr Dre’s 2001 was the first album I ever bought on CD as a kid. A fact I'm proud of, because it's gone on to become recognized as one of the greatest hip-hop albums ever made. OK, so I was about eleven, I’m not claiming it was some sort of underage-whiteboy hip-hop foresight, but it made me feel pretty special nonetheless. Anyway, a friend and I made a deal that, if I got 2001, he’d get The Slim Shady LP and we'd record each others’ freshly-bought, extremely child-friendly albums onto tapes, two for the price of one. Go, teamwork!So, even in 1999, kids were doing artists out of their hard-earned dollar by ripping their albums, even if it was in the most basic way (relentlessly pausing the CD and turning the tape over) possible. Sounds pretty labor-intensive, right? Well, I'm sorry, stealing music is human instinct, even if it’s a bit of a ball-ache to do. What you want is the music, not the CD, not the pretty pictures that come with the CD, nor the five hundred word list of shout outs. And this isn’t something that was born from technology, but facilitated by it, leaving artists with two options: adapt and overcome, or moan about it forever and make no money.Thirteen years on, and Dre seems pretty unfazed by that album sale I cunningly diddled him out of, as he sits in Forbes' celebrity rich list, knocking Simon Cowell down a few pegs to runner-up. He probably doesn’t even care that Detox never happened, or that the two singles that came from it —"Kush" and "I Need A Doctor"—were complete dog shit. We all know Dre’s tunes certainly aren’t what they used to be, so how the hell is he top dog?The first point to note is that Dre doesn’t need any more songs, his legacy is cemented. I mean, he was in N.W.A. for Christ’s sake. He invented "G-funk"! He’s produced everyone in hip-hop, from Raekwon to that girl E-V-E, to frickin' H-O-V. WHAT HAVE YOU DONE WITH YOUR LIFE, EH? The second, and probably more noteworthy point, is that Dre has never been precious about branching out.Hewlett Packard were one of the first to jump aboard the Dre gravy train, when they thought he was enough of a musical genius to make laptop speakers sound good (idiots, everyone knows laptop speakers will never sound good). Dre was happy to oblige, picking up the cheque and laughing all the way to the bank. Then, which if you've ever opened your eyes and spotted what's draped around the neck of every single self-righteous, "true music fan, yeah?" dork on public transport, there's the Beats By Dr Dre headphones empire. When did that one even happen? On top of that, did you know he’s also an executive producer for an FX crime series about the LA underworld, which has just had its pilot commissioned? This is a guy who clearly does not give one solitary fuck about having to make more songs.Obviously, not every artist is going to nail the level of mogul-dom Dre’s achieved, a mogul-dom that's amassed him a cool $110 million, FYI. And I'm definitely not saying that, in order to make money, musicians should give music up after their first album and take a business studies course, erm, cos' that would be retarded. But I'm just bored of hearing artists moan after realizing that most music fans are light-fingered thieves, when they've got a whole wealth of potential opportunities in front of them.In short, when Dre said: “When your album sales wasn’t doing too good / Who’s the doctor they told you to go see?” It wasn’t bravado, it was a prophecy.
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