OU alum"s company behind Grammy-nominated "Crank That"
By Kristin Majcher
February 14, 2008
While many Ohio University students know the dance to the tune “Crank That (Soulja Boy),” the hit song’s Athens connection has remained something of a secret.
A company run by Stu Pflaum, a 2006 OU graduate, published “Crank That (Soulja Boy),” which was nominated for this year’s Grammy award in the Best New Rap Song category.
Though Kanye West won the award with his song “Good Life” on Sunday, being listed in the nomination for the most prestigious award in the music industry is no small feat.
Pflaum said he learned of the nomination from a Google alert, and he called friends and family to tell them the news. But he became truly excited when online blogs started predicting the song would win.
Pflaum founded Element 9 Hip Hop, a promotion company that uses a grassroots approach to connect urban artists with their fans through online campaigns. He started working with Soulja Boy, an artist from Atlanta, by means of connections in the industry.
A native of Cleveland, Pflaum grew up listening to hip-hop music from all over the country. His influences include Nas, UGK, Dr. Dre, and 2pac. Midwest hip-hop was a big part of his life, and he attributes this partly to witnessing Cleveland’s Bone Thugs N’ Harmony cultivate national success.
“Hip-hop music, and as culture, has been a key motivator to a lot of the decisions I’ve made with my life,” Pflaum said.
Pflaum entered onto the hip-hop scene as a DJ before promoting other artists. He became interested in DJing when he met DJ Kut Nyce growing up.
Kut Nyce helped Pflaum transition from making mixtapes to using vinyl, and the two pitched in on a set of turntables and an old vinyl collection when Pflaum was 16.
Pflaum started college at UCLA, where he studied screenwriting and acting. He came to OU and started working on a bachelor’s degree in entertainment law and management during his junior year.
“I always felt that there was a place for me in the entertainment industry,” he said.
Pflaum (known as DJ Xplosive) said he expected there to be many venues for him to display his craft when he came to Athens, but found that only two clubs had house DJs, neither of whom widely embraced the hip-hop genre. He started promoting his own shows by asking venues to host hip-hop events.
Pflaum was the DJ and primary booking agent for hip-hop band Noble Savages. The group started playing with established musicians, and eventually gained enough of a fan base to headline their own shows.
It was through the opening slots for these shows that emcees such as Jesty Beatz and Detrick Rhodes started playing for large crowds in Athens.
Pflaum started Element 9 Hip Hop in the summer of 2005 when he realized he wanted to start promoting other artists. The name comes from rapper KRS-One’s proclamation about the nine elements of hip-hop culture, the last being the concept of “street entrepreneurialism.”
“To be honest, I didn’t have much direction at the time I launched the company, but I knew that I wanted to begin something that others could be a part of, as opposed to the self-promotion for myself that I had been accustomed to,” Pflaum said.
The young entrepreneur began to use the Element 9 logo to identify events and projects with the company. Eventually he wanted the growing company to be recognized on a wider plane, and started utilizing the networking sites MySpace and Facebook to promote artists on a national level.
After graduating, Pflaum moved to New York to work for the Democratic National Committee, running an office for canvassers raising money for the party. He quickly realized that the job was not for him, and decided to focus instead on the music industry.
Pflaum had made a contact with DJ Tony Franklin, who helped him get an internship at Asylum Records, a division of Warner Music Group. There, he learned how record labels worked and how to develop an album from start to finish.
Pflaum stayed with Asylum until early 2007, when he decided to devote more time to Element 9. When Franklin’s Cleveland-based company NuBlud Management started promoting Soulja Boy in February 2007, he asked Pflaum to assist with the effort.
Element 9 started promoting Soulja Boy through the Internet, and eventually became the publisher for his whole catalog of recordings. Pflaum attributes the success of Soulja Boy to his company’s online marketing campaigns, which have become vital to the success of Element 9.
“Element 9’s ability to deliver strategic online marketing campaigns for urban artists has become the cornerstone of the company over the past few years,” Pflaum said. “We ran the online promotions for Soulja Boy while he was an independent artist and had him out-competing many of music’s top acts in terms of popularity through the various promotions we executed.”
Pfluam said that Element 9 has an advantage over larger promotion companies because it’s willing to give equal attention to artists who have sold millions of records and artists who are still in the process of recording their first album.
While the record industry has dealt with losses in record sales, Pflaum predicted the industry will never see a surge in the sales of tangible CDs.
“Technology is by far the most vital element not only for the future of hip-hop, but the music industry as a whole,” said Pflaum. “Some labels seem to still be operating under the mindset that this digital world we’re living in is just a phase, and at some point we’ll be back to seeing artists selling millions of copies of physical CDs, so it’s our job to break the news that this isn’t going to happen.”
Pflaum advises students interested in developing their own business to approach all activities as opportunities to be included in a portfolio, and to make sure they are studying what interests them. Though switching majors in his junior year delayed his graduation, he added, he gained valuable experience that he still uses in his work.
“Don’t leave college without a plan,” Pflaum said. “Trust me, it’s worth spending the extra time and absorbing a little more loan debt to know that when you’re leaving Athens, you actually know where you want to land.”
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