By now, you've probably seen eighth-grader Rebecca Black's viral video "Friday." If you haven't you can view it here. While the video has been seen over 30 million times, the majority of viewers have bashed the video, writing comments like, "this. is. bad. The WORST song I've ever heard" and "if this is what is considered music i want to shoot myself." Unfortunately, the aforementioned comments are pretty tame compared to what other viewers are saying. While I agree that "Friday" isn't the best song out there, I also feel that there is an incredibly strong force behind Rebecca Black in the form of independent record label, Ark Music Factory.

Ark's been quick to cash in on Rebecca Black ever since "Friday" went viral. In the past week Black's appeared on Good Morning America in a five-minute segment titled "Worst Song Ever?", garnered a spot on iTunes top 100 downloads list and organized a mini-tour across America. While there may be few sincere Rebecca Black fans, this hasn't prevented Ark from making presumably thousands of dollars off of her. And they're not only making money from Black; other Ark artists have received hundreds of thousands of views on YouTube since "Friday" blew up all over the internet. For instance, fellow Ark artist Alana Lee's "Butterflies" music video had about a quarter of a million views last week; now, it has nearly two and a half million.

After poking around Ark's YouTube channel and website, I found that Ark's mission is to, "Make it possible for emerging independent artists from a variety of popular genres to be discovered, defined, and delivered, to advance in their chosen career and be successful." However, Ark's artists are all preteen and teen girls that fall primarily within the pop music genre... and, they all pretty much sound alike. At least, lyrically speaking, the content of Ark's artists is mainly about having crushes on boys and partying on the weekends. (As if middle school students really party.)

By scanning Ark's online sites, I had hoped to find out who the black rapper was in all of Ark's music videos (affectionately named "Fat Usher" by some bloggers). I was curious as to what a 30-something-year-old rapper was doing in all of these teen girls' videos. In all honesty, I found it a little, errr, creepy. Unfortunately, I never got an answer, except that the guy's name is Pato. But, today when I checked Ark's site I saw a post which announced that an exclusive Ark interview would be coming to YouTube. To my relief, the first question that would be answered is "Who is the black guy in all the videos?" WIN! The informational video is set to air this Friday, March 25th. I'll be posting it on DYNAMIC as soon as it airs, just in case any of you are also wondering who Fat Usher really is.