Over the past year (and longer) Luke Wroblewski (@lukew) has been tracking mobile usage and posting lots and lots of statistics. The overall trend is undeniable: mobile is exploding. If you need convincing, scroll on down. Luke is a leading thinker in the mobile space, well known for popularizing the concept of mobile-first design, and he is great at helping people understand just why mobile matters. (The headers below link to his original posts.)

Oh wait my phone is ringing ;]

In NJ, summer 2011, I witnessed a violent conversation about what is the best mobile music app. It pretty much sums up the state of mobile music streaming in 2011:

Alternatives that come to mind are MOG and Grooveshark—both of which share the same main attraction as Rdio and Spotify: on-demand streaming. They are fundamentally different from discovery-centered apps like Pandora. Last.fm and exfm are in the cross. Who’s back do you have…what’s your vote? ▼

▲ Back to top or view more sets.

Kaiser Chiefs singer Ricky Wilson performs in 2005. – Photo: Andrew Kendall.

“If you haven’t got a scene you’ve gotta’ set your own scene” said Kaiser Chiefs singer Ricky Wilson at 31:40 and “keep your ears peeled” for song ideas said drummer Nick Hodgson at 51:00 during their interview below with Steve Lamacq on BBC Music:

Ultra Music Festival 13 hit Miami on March 25–27, 2011 and if you attended, then chances are you got shot by the lens of Adam Jackson, corresponding photographer, at least once. Jackson is a prolific lifestreamer and photographer who’s made his way to UMF every year since 2004. Researchers have clocked him at 60 photos per minute—I don’t know how he performs his magic but it’s lucky for us he does—and without a press press no doubt. Please share the s%!+ outta’ this post in hopes UMF will get him one next year. Amen.

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3OH!3 singer Sean Foreman performs in California in 2009. 3OH!3 reportedly reached “3.7 million fans via 304 different artists” through Headliner.fm. Photo: Flickr/msimmondsphotography

“Promotion on the social web was broken. We wanted to see if we could make it better.” –Mike More, Headliner.fm co-founder.

This interview was a long time coming. Mike More (@mikemore) had introduced himself to me last June via email. He was excited to talk on the phone about what he referred to as fan trading—the concept behind his new startup Headliner.fm which mirrors live music’s headliner-opener relationship online.

What’s the story behind Headliner?

MM: We [Mike More and Bill Cromie] were working with all the major labels, TV networks, and film studios helping them to promote their new release via video on the social web. While we were doing this we realized how broken music promotion and marketing for bands and artists on the social web was. We also saw early on the move from the inbox to the stream or real-time communications and that this was growing very quickly. So we put our heads together and thought like a band or artist. We asked ourselves what is the best way to reach new fans on Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, and mobile devices. The answer was simple: ask other bands with similar fans to tell their fans about your band—collaborative promotion. We liked this idea because having bands become the filters for messages seemed the best way for bands to get the most of Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, and mobile platforms. Having an artist recommend another artist is like having a chef recommend a restaurant. You know that this person who is making the recommendation has taken his or her time to vet it, and has the background that would allow them to be well-qualified to make a recommendation. Additionally, collaborative promotion rewards bands for their existing fan base and allows them to reach new fans fans in a scalable, authentic way. These ideas were the guiding principles of Headliner and kinda where Nabbr [their previous company] fell short.

Headliner launched in late 2009—what are some things you’ve learned along the way since then?

MM: The most important thing we learned is to listen to our users. Headliner is here for one reason—to serve their needs period. We have just partnered with SoundCloud so our users can check out other bands music quickly and easily before they accept promotions from other artists. This was the number one request by the bands who use Headliner so we implemented it quickly. The SoundCloud partnership allows bands to syndicate their music to Facebook and Twitter—Headliner is becoming an artist-run content syndication network on top of Facebook and Twitter.

How does online promotion compare to offline promotion?

Playing a show you get to get your music in front of a new audience for 20-min or an hour. The audience are having drinks hanging with their friends and having a good time. On radio once your song is added to a national play list your song will be heard by millions of people tens of thousands of times daily. The signal-to-noise ratio is much lower on both of these offline promotions. Radio is like 20 songs 50 times a day and that’s it. Both of these are very hard to replicate on social media platforms. Most large brands would have a hard time replicating the impact of a live show, national radio, or TV campaign online.

Additionally the signal-to-noise ratio on the social web is way out of control. You need to think of social media differently. The only similarities—and what holds true for both—are that you need to have great music and you need to reach a large new audience with enough frequency to break through the noise on Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, and mobile devices. What we see is that it takes more reach and frequency to stand out on the social than offline. The main advantages of social media are the lower cost of using scalable viral techniques and the quality of new fans you can reach.

On which social network—Twitter, Facebook, or MySpace—does Headliner seem to work the best. Are fans on one network ‘worth’ more than on another? What’s the exchange rate so to speak?

MM: We see a higher response rate on Facebook and Twitter mainly because Headliner only messages fans via status updates. That said, when MySpace changed their band pages and placed status updates on top of the page we saw response rates jump up a MySpace. We have 133 million fans over all about 40 million on Facebook, 37 million on Twitter and 56 million on MySpace. We see this because bands still have a lot of fans or social capital on MySpace music.

I don’t think fans are worth more or less on any platform. A fan is worth more to a band when they’re real and engaged in the band’s music. The exchange rate is one Band Buck to reach one new fan on any platform. That said, bands can choose only to run promotions on Facebook, Twitter, or MySpace so bands can chose which platform they think is most useful for their promotion needs.

How does the pricing work?

MM: We have a freemium model. So any band of any size can sign up for Headliner and reach 15k new fans on us—plus earn Band Bucks for their existing fans and by accepting promotions from other bands.

It’s critical for us that bands have a free service to reach new fans which is better than any paid alternative. We want the free experience to be so good that some portion of our bands will want to upgrade to the Pro level to get a few more bells and whistles.

So for free you get to reach new fans for free on Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, and mobile. We have two subscription accounts, Pro ($30/month) and Platinum ($50/month), which include additional features [e.g. deeper analytics and location-based targeting. Pro comes with 300k Band Bucks per month and Platinum comes with 750k, equivalent to 300 and 750 "new fans" respectively.]

Do bands that have a larger fan base have greater authority or ranking?

MM: No, bands on Headliner with larger fan bases do not have greater authority. In fact, smaller bands or bands who have smaller fan bases tend to have more reactive fans than bands who have over 500k fans.

We have a chart that ranks bands by how many new fans they reach and how many promotions they accept from other bands. We wanted to create a chart which rewarded bands who are best at cross-promotion other bands.

Do you have any other social web communication insights?

MM: The real-time web or status updates have changed the way fans communicate on the social web. If you look where all the action is on Facebook it’s around status updates. Bands need to get their music into the stream.

Who are your favorite artists—Headliner or not?

MM: That’s easy. I’m a big Wu-Tang Clan fan. We have both Redman and Method Man on Headliner. I love their music.

Tell us about Nabbr—how did you go from Nabbr to Headliner?

MM: Nabbr was a great learning experience for both myself and Bill. We started Nabbr as almost a completely different company. The original idea was for a media-rich list of anything on the web that you could share through social media—think StumbleUpon with video, music, and images. We did not really get that much traction with this idea. So via a conversation with a friend of mine, Steve Greenberg, who was the president of Columbia Records at the time, we came up with the idea for what Nabbr ultimately became—a video-syndication network. Steve had just finished a CD with a new group he signed—the Jonas Brothers. He was very excited about his new group. He’d shot three videos for he same song with three different endings but was having difficulties getting traditional media to give his them any thought. Traditional radio had rejected the idea of playing the Jonas Brothers because of their age and pop music had just fallen out of style, and TRL was a no go. So Steve asked us how we could help get out. I suggested he start a MySpace page for his band—keep in mind this was 2005 when MySpace had about 12 million users—and we would post his videos on the front page of their MySpace page and make the video shareable (pre-YouTube).

This stunt worked okay but did not really move the needle for the Jonas Brothers. As we took a look at the Jonas Brothers fans we saw that one fan owned a site called whateverlife who had 3 million kids showing up a month. I reached out to her as asked her to post the Jonas Brothers video on her front page with a button to vote for the band on TRL within a day the Jonas Brothers made it to #4 on TRL. Steve called me in disbelief and asked me is this was real. I told him first of all you paid us nothing to help you and second of all we are small startup living on Ramen soup and no sleep—what money do we have to invest in your artist? The rest you say is history—shortly thereafter we found hundreds of other social media sites and reached a combined audience of 40 million monthly unique viewers where we syndicated video for all the major labels, movie studios, and TV networks. Since then both video and the social web have exploded.

In a lot of ways Headliner is a much better way to syndicate content on the social web—it’s smarter, faster, cheaper, more targeted, and authentic.

What’s on the horizon for Headliner in 2011?

MM: Our big goal in 2011 to help as many bands and artists as possible to build their fan bases through the power of collaborative promotions. Collaborative promotion is not a new idea for bands but until now has been hard to scale without a platform. We want to help create long-term value for bands and artists who use social media to reach and engage their fans. On this note we plan to roll out more tools to help bands and artists find discover the best bands and artists to promote with. The idea is that the more that a band uses Headliner the easier it should become to message new fans about a new show, track, or post.

// Notes: The interview took place via emails in 2011 and was edited for clarity.