Dr Dre has announced that he’ll be donating all the royalties from his newly released album Compton to help fund a new performing arts centre in his hometown of Compton, California.

The news was unveiled on Zane Lowe’s Beats 1 programme on Thursday (August 6th), the eve of the release of Dre’s first album in 16 years, called Compton: A Soundtrack, which features music inspired by the new N.W.A. biopic Straight Outta Compton which is out on August 14th.

Dr DreDr Dre will be donating the proceeds from new album 'Compton' to fund a new arts centre in the city

“I feel it's the right thing to do and I hope everybody appreciates the work I put into this album,” the producer and label owner said, on the same day that Apple Music gave an exclusive preview of the album the day before its release.

More: Dr Dre announces release date for first new album in 16 years ‘Compton: A Soundtrack’

Dre will have a say on the new project, working in tandem with Compton’s mayor Aja Brown. “We've reached out to Aja Brown quite a few times in the last month or two,” Dre said. “I've been really trying to do something special for Compton and just couldn't quite figure out what it was.”

Compton, a city in the south of Los Angeles County in California, was the birthplace of Dre’s pioneering hip-hop group N.W.A. in the late 1980s. “She [Brown] actually had this idea and she was already in the process of working on it. I said, 'Boom, this is what we should do.'”

Dre also said that Compton, which features contributions from up-and-coming artists as well as Eminem and Kendrick Lamar, would be his “grand finale”. It means that the much-speculated-upon Detox, which has always been mooted as the follow-up to 2001 – confusingly released in 1999 – is now dead and buried.

Explaining his decision not to release Detox, he said frankly “I worked my ass off on it, I don't think I did a good enough job, and I couldn't do that to my fans and I couldn't do that to myself, to be perfectly honest with you. I just wasn't feeling it.”

More: Dr Dre to host new radio show ‘The Pharmacy’ on Apple Music’s Beats 1