Via: Allhiphop
Soulja Boy recently sat down with the Wall Street Journal to discus his business practices on the net, and among other things, his new album The DeAndre Way, set to debut November 30th.
Soulja took the time to tell everyone exactly how he came up and progressed from A high school student to a hip-hop mogul.
“My whole story is around 2005 I started rapping and recorded my first mixtape. Around 2006 I discovered the Internet and started using SoundClick to upload my music to get around the U.S. and I started using Myspace and Youtube and that’s when my name really started to grow,” Soulja Boy told the Wall Street Journal.
“After I reached my first million hits on Myspace, I had put up my OG Miami Mike’s email address and after that we had a bout 20-30 requests to perform,” Soulja Boy said reminiscing of his past.
While building his name on Soundclick, the rapper was generating ad revenue of 50 cents per download and averaging about 19,000 downloads per day.
“Well I built my name on SoundClick first,” Soulja continued. “Basically that’s the like the Billboard Charts for underground artists. Once I reached the top 10 on there my plays just started to increase, after every week, after every month. Then after I found MySpace, I linked my MySpace page directly from my Soundclick page.”
New marketing for Soulja Boy’s upcoming project entails using the services of a company by the name of SayNow.
“I took it a step further with this company called SayNow, and that’s basically a phone number that lets you talk to all your fans like how Twitter is,” Soulja Boy told the Wall Street Journal. “SayNow is like, if a fans calls my line number and they want to subscribe to you, so that means they hear any message that you leave them. If I call and leave a message it goes directly to all 4.9 million people at one time.”
Always finding new ways to market his projects, Soulja Boy now has over 20 websites working directly under him or for him.
“I just thought, like I should build as many websites as possible,” Soulja Boy said. “When I was unsigned and on the grind trying to come up, I would make a lot of websites and just try and get my names out there. Now that I am in the position I am in now, I just like to take all of my creative ideas and put them on a website to give fans something to do.”
In related news, Soulja spoke about the use of camera phones or video to bring him down in anyway or to slander his name, although he did not mentioned Katt Stacks, who released footage of the rapper allegedly using cocaine, a charge he vehemently denied and blamed on slick editing.
“When you are successful person, I feel like people are always going to have different opinions towards you,” Soulja Boy said. “There might be people that have nothing but positive love for your and good intentions, or you might have people that just have nothing but negative energy towards you and that want to knock you down.”
