Believe it or not, Soulja Boy released his smash hit ‘Crank That” 12 years ago now, and since then rap music has changed drastically — with CDs no longer being the standard listening format and everything mainly being digital.
It’s already been said that Soulja Boy was responsible for sparking that shift, and one could label him the very first Internet rap star, which he recently talked about.
“I was the first artist on the Internet,” he told Baller Alert. “I was the first rapper on YouTube. I showed these artists how to be social media famous and social media savvy. No artist was on Instagram and Twitter. Let’s be real. Now every artist in the world has an Instagram, Twitter, YouTube page and doing blogs. I was doing that 10 years ago as a teenager, and people had to catch up.”
It’s also been said the Internet, as well inexpensive home recording studios, have lessened the quality of rap music since one no longer has to go through the studio owner gatekeepers or expensive producers. And some have blamed Soulja for that change as well. But the rapper denied it and said he helped hip-hop by creating another revenue stream.
“I’m the reason record labels are doing music streaming now,” stated Soulja. “There’s no more CDs no more. When I came out with ‘Crank That’ (Soulja Boy),’ it went No. 1, sold 10 million copies and went diamond. They said that I killed hip-hop.”
“What I really did was change hip-hop to digital streaming,” he added … So they should be thanking me. All you artists out there, all you record labels, you owe me like 5 percent of all y’all sales, because I showed y’all how to do this.”
You can see the clip of Soulja below.
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