Soulja Boy recently shared that his 2008 hit single “Kiss Me Thru the Phone” earned him way more money than people expected.
When the Atlanta rapper released the song featuring R&B singer Sammie, he didn’t expect to rake in around $100,000 a month in additional income. At the time, there hadn’t been a popular song with a phone number as a lyric since Houston rapper Mike Jones dropped his 2005 single “Back Then.” The number (678) 999-8212 was the “She Make It Clap” artist’s personal cell phone number when the song first came out.
“We gotta get the number back, man,” he told HipHopDX. “That number so legendary, man, you know how they do. It used to be my number. It actually was my number at a point in time. When I first dropped that song, that was my number.”
“Alright, let me tell y’all the real story. Boom. So that number was like a fan line. So every time somebody called that number, I was getting paid off of that s**t. It was like a subscription. You could text it or call it, so I was probably making like $100,000 a month off of that, just people calling that number,” the 32-year-old explained. “So probably after like two years, three years or something, the company that I had the number with, they shut down. So I guess once they shut down, somebody came and got the number, you feel me? But I gotta get that number back though, for sure.”
According to HipHopDX, Soulja Boy originally wanted Chris Brown to sing the hook, but for a reason he couldn’t recall, it didn’t happen. He got Sammie to sing the song instead, which he said was a great idea since it blew up and made him a nice bag.
“‘Kiss Me Thru the Phone,’ bruh, that song — so many f**king streams, bro,” he said. “It just went so many times platinum like yesterday or something. That’s like one of my biggest songs, too. When I was originally making that record, I knew it was gonna be big, but it was like, I knew I wanted somebody to sing the hook,” he said.
He continued, “I wanted to sing it myself originally, but I was like nah, ‘I really wanna give it that extra feel.’ And now I see the success that it got, I feel like I was right.”
Watch Soulja Boy tell the story in his own words below:
