Hip Hop - the music and the business - has been struggling over the past few years. According to Fox News, “though music sales are down overall, rap sales slid a whopping 21 percent from 2005 to 2006, and for the first time in 12 years no rap album was among the top 10 sellers of the [2006].”

It looks as if this industry needs a fire starter, or at least someone who owns a pack of matches.

Enter Mr. Collipark.  First name, Mr.

Mr. Collipark literally wrote the book on how a young rapper can break into the business of hip hop.  To prove he can walk the talk, Mr. Collipark went out found Soulja Boy: 

Soulja Boy is part Mississippi teenager, part Flava Flav, part crunk (I frickin’ hate crunk), rhythmically unoriginal, and lyrically boring, but that’s not the point.

The point is Soulja Boy is a Millennial.  For him, music isn’t just about sound, it is about community, it is digital, and it is open for interpretation.

According to mun2, Soulja Boy ”began posting his songs on the music-based social networking site Soundclick.com, before creating his own website, SouljaBoytellem.com, and, most recently, exploding on MySpace where he’s received over 11.5 million visits and accumulated 400,000 friends.”  Soulja Boy even came up with a dance for his hit song, Crank That, and put a video on YouTube to teach people how to do the moves.

Within a few months, MySpace rated Soulja Boy the #1 artist out of 30 million independent artists on their site (in terms of traffic, plays and downloads).

But all of this was still underground.  The Hip Hop industry had not found him.

Enter Mr. Collipark.  Driving down the street one day he sees a group of kids doing the Soulja Boy dance.  He rolls down his window to hear a song he has never heard before.  After doing a search for the song online, Mr. realizes just how strong the following is for Soulja Boy, so he promptly sends Soulja Boy an instant message and heads for his house. 

I’m hesitant to transcribe what Soulja Boy posted on his blog after his meeting with Mr. Collipark as it’s a little risque for a corporate blog, but you can read it here.

The rest is short history.  Rather than package Soulja Boy and spit him out like a Hip Hop artist circa 1995, Mr. Collipark took the social network Soulja Boy had already established and expanded it.  Polished videos were soon on MySpace and SouljaBoyTellum.com.  Ringtones, message boards, photos, and schwag were all available on his home page.  Best of all, snippets of Soulja Boy’s rise to fame were posted on YouTube as a daily podcast giving avid fans unparallelled emotional connection with the artist.

Crank That Video: 9 Million Hits

Crank That Dance Instructions: 12 Million Hits

From Vodcasts to Soulja Boy TV (coming soon):

Radio stations soon picked it up Crank That because Soulja Boy finally broke into “the industry”, and in the matter of months a bunch of rich white people watching a UT football game saw this on the sideline:

Like any modern day mogul-in-the-making, Soulja Boy is a social-network celebrity. His official YouTube video for Crank That has attracted nine million views in just over 30 days while an earlier home video that teaches viewers how to do “Soulja Boy Dance” has been requested a whopping 12 million times.

Bravo Mr. Collipark, and bravo, Soulja Boy.  You have built a network and sold an artist that won’t even have an album in stores until October 27th.

In the opinion of this author, as well as this one, Mr. Collipark and Soulja Boy aren’t so much producer and artist as they are connections planner and creative director.

One final note, as I’m finishing up this blog, a guy outside my office window is listening to Crank That.  His car windows are down so that all of us can listen, or dance, to Soulja Boy.