I think it’s fair to say that all music record labels in the world are always in search of the next super star artist and hit song and I’m sure there are many different ways to go about doing that. But new Interscope artist from Atlanta, Soulja Boy, has not only managed to create a hit song ‘Crank Dat’… more impressively he has managed to take his song and music video viral.

Ok, I admit that it is arguable whether or not his song actually deserves the amount of popularity that it has (it isn’t exactly a masterpiece) but he has managed to shoot into relative superstardom among his target audience and has kids/teens/young adults singing and dancing to his song around the world.

Now – I mention dancing, but Soulja Boy fans know that you don’t just ‘shake your booty’ so to speak to this song, because EVERYONE knows that there’s a dance to it. Yes, you read that right, there’s a choreographed dance to this song – developed by the Soulja Boy team themselves. The best part – there’s an instructional video of it, on YouTube (posted by Soulja Boy), where you see Soulja Boy and his crew speaking directly to you, and teaching you how to do their dance. Why don’t more artists do this? It’s fun (depending on who you talk to), it definitely is engaging, and pretty cool when the song comes on in a club and everyone starts doing the dance. This video happens to be one of the most viewed videos on YouTube of all time with 24,087,136 views (24th most viewed to be exact).
The actual music video for ‘Crank that’, also posted by Soulja Boy himself, has done even better with an impressive 28,467,055 views – the 16th most viewed video of all time on YouTube – I’d say that’s pretty impressive.

So how have they managed to become so successful? Soulja Boy has his own YouTube Channel where they not only post the latest clips from their concerts or their newest music video – they also provide a healthy list of different mashups created by regular N-Geners or other artists. Soulja Boy gets it. They understand that the youth today like to customize, make things their own and remix – and they have experienced great success in allowing their fans to do so. Some of these mashups that have also done incredibly well include: a Travis Barker remix (drummer from Blink 182) with 8,753,679 views, a SpongeBob square pants remix with 22,337,817 views, and even a group of young ballet students doing the dance with 1,084,783 views.

* note: the screen shot I took of these mashups were from a bit less than a month ago, so the view count as you can see has gone up a couple million in that time*

So for your viewing pleasure, here is our – New Paradigm created (credit: Derek Pokora) – mashup of mashups… enjoy.