Soulja Boy gives Wall Street Journal the bizness
His rap skills may be questionable, but the boy is calculating
?
This is a really weird interview if you watch it, like I did, assuming that Soulja Boy and WSJ's Lee Hawkins are sitting in front of an audience of typical Wall Street Journal readers. Not until the performance — which really is really weird, due to technical issues — did I realize that the crowd was peopled mostly with Soulja Boy fans.
?
At 20, he still sounds like a kid when he talks, but he knows his business. Listen to him talk about utilizing newer social media platforms (SayNow) and his reasoning behind having 20 websites.
?
Hawkins skirts around Soulja Boy's recent Kat Stacks controversy and covers old ground for the most part, crowning SB "the music industry's king of social media" for his inventive use of the digital space to nurture his audience long before major labels got hip. Dude claims he was 16 and making $30,000 per weekend for shows (3 x $10,000), not to mention the money he was splitting with Soundclick on a weekly average of 19,000 downloads.
?
Considering all the leverage Soulja Boy entered the game with, the real question is what kind of first-time deal did he choose to sign with ColliPark/Interscope? If it's the same seven-album/seven cents per song royalty rate most first-time artist/songwriters get, something's wrong. He pretty much created the model that the industry now exploits to churn out pop stars like Justin Bieber. It'll be interesting to see how long he can hang on to his fan base.