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? ▼

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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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I was fortunate enough to stumble across them back in 2004–05 when You’re a Woman, I’m a Machine was released and I immediately understood that this band was something else in terms of basically everything. The brilliant elephant trunks logo on the pink background was one of the best album covers I had ever seen and the songs where all simply brutally amazing, the lyrics smart and quirky as fuck and the lads looked boss in all of their pictures. I was lucky to see them live on a small show in the Mercury Lounge during that time:

They were bound to be massive, and it came to a point when everyone started to know the name. During this transition into mas popularity, as the snobby cunt I am, I started to follow them less, although I understood this was a band that was destined for glory: they were fuckin’ savage. Then one day in the blog in their website that Jesse use to update that they were disbanding and though I thought it was a shame I did respect the fact that they call it quits before it all became too shabby.

A few weeks ago I read that they almost caused a riot on SXSW and I immediately relived the excitement and curiosity that they had produced in me when I was a little 20-year-old little bitch. Death From Above 1979 is back. Death From Above 1979 is back. Death From Above 1979 is fucking back!!!

2012-01-05: Reposted via Terrace Fashionista.

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.

Photo: Flickr/XtelBoom

In the next two weeks we will probably see the hashtag #SXSW enough times to make our eyes bleed. What I really want is the music. Last year I compiled a killer set of 27 SXSW music photos taken by photographers on Flickr. This year we may as well try to top it, and to do that I’m enlisting help from anyone lucky enough to be attending SXSW with a digital camera.

It’s real easy. To submit photos please add them to our Flickr group during or after the event. Captions and tags are a big help. Photo credits will be clearly visible in the set for any photos that are featured. No watermarks please—watermarks aren’t rock and roll.

Don’t mess with Texas—wear sunscreen and earplugs. Have fun. Mosh. Be safe!

P.S. What bands are you most amped up to see?

Tom Silverman has made his entire career in the music industry. Circa the early 80s he founded Dance Music Report, the New Music Seminar (NMS) and Tommy Boy Records, now Tommy Boy Entertainment, whose roster includes hip hop staples De La Soul, Naughty by Nature, House of Pain, and more. WE+PR, the public relations team who works with NMS, set up a phone interview for me with Silverman, who had tons to say about the music industry. Stream the full interview—all 55min—by pressing the play button to the ←left—or on Bandcamp.

Our interview took place on January 20, 2011. Later that night he would fly to France to attend MIDEM and I would drive with my dad to Philadelphia—fearless of impending snow—to see my cousin Sharon headline at Johnny Brenda’s. On the phone that afternoon, Silverman told me about some of his early experiences with Tommy Boy Records, thoughts on the current state of the industry, and about the then upcoming New Music Seminar in Los Angeles—NMS LA 2011 took place last week (February 14–16).

If you remember I’d attended NMS NYC 2010 last summer and had heard Silverman speak to the summer crowd inside Webster Hall. I can tell you he is extremely passionate about what’s right and wrong in the music industry, which you’ll be able to hear yourself as our conversation heats up through the interview. Below I’ve transcribed a few select moments.

08:00 Silverman: We aren’t selling records—we’re selling perception. The perceived value of music is 100 percent arbitrary.

09:30 Silverman: He [Steve Jobs] has to work with a gigantic lead time and drop new products every 3–6 months like we drop albums. We haven’t thought about the obsolescence of music [in the way that Jobs thinks about Apple's product lifecycles].

15:45 Silverman: [On iTunes] every time somebody coverts from buying songs to buying an album [Soundscan] deducts it from buying singles. It acts almost as if those singles hadn’t been bought. So if I bought two singles from an artist last year and then I bought the album this year, then that artist gets minus two singles. So that’s also had an impact. In 18 percent of iTunes sales, album sales are ‘complete my album’ sales, and with some artists it’s a lot more than that. So every time somebody completes an album it’s a minimun of one song, but most usually it’s two songs that are minused out. That’s had a major impact in turning song sales backwards, not because less songs are selling, but because single songs are being coverted into albums and then being deducted from singles.

16:45 Silverman: What’s happening right now is catalog sales are dropping off in singles and they’re slowing down substantially in albums (digital albums) because people have already rebought their collections in MP3 form—in digital form.

25:05 RVE: If you’re going to advertise anywhere I don’t know why you would do it anywhere besides Facebook—because of the way you can target stuff. [...] Say you’re in a rock band in New York City. You could target an ad on Facebook to people that like the Smashing Pumpkins that live in New York City that are between the age of 20–25. [...] I wouldn’t advise anyone to buy ads on Google. I know Google makes all this money from ads but I never click on them—I have clicked on Facebook ads.

34:10 RVE: I was reading about [Pablo Picaso] on Wikipedia and there’s so many things that correlate to the music industry. [...] They said the total number of artworks he produced is estimated at 50,000 which is a lot of pieces of [art] but he didn’t sell most of them. He had most of them in his possession when he died. He only sold the ones that he needed to sell to make money. The rest of them he kept because…I guess he just wanted to keep them or was just to busy making art. He wasn’t really concerned with it. I wonder if today if he’d be like taking pictures of it and uploading pictures of it to Flickr…or you know? Also they said that his art has been stolen more than any other artist in the world. [...] He’s pretty much referred to as the most famous artist.

35:35 Silverman: There’s influential art and there’s popular art. Just because it’s popular it doesnn’t necessarily mean that it’s important but it does mean something. Margaret Mead, the famous cultural anthropologist, said “never doubt that a small group of thoughtful committed citizens can change the world—indeed it is the only thing that ever has.” The point is it’s always a small group of people that make all the change. [...] Kind of like Kool Herc, Afrika Bambaataa, and Grandmaster Flash all in the Bronx doing hip hop and nobody else in the world was doing hip hop—it changed the whole world really but it came from a 5-mile radius.

36:45 RVE: People would probably want me to ask about what you said in the Wired interview last year about most albums being just “noise” from “hobbyists” that clutters the marketplace. I mean I think that came across as kind of like a negative outlook to a lot of people, but I was thinking, aren’t really—I mean a hobbyist is really someone that just does something for pleasure. I think it has sort of a negative connotation [...] but aren’t the hobbyists the ones really driving musical innovation, or don’t you think they’re playing a big part in that?

37:30 Silverman: It doesn’t seem like they are. I always believed that they would be but it doesn’t seem like they are. Why isn’t any of that stuff breaking through? I mean if it’s that fantastic, it’s findable, everything findable, somebody’s got to discover it, and the word needs to spread. Why isn’t all this fantastic, creative, amazing art coming out musically through the web where everything is available accoding to the long-tail theory.

38:00 RVE: You want to think the cream will rise to the top.

38:03 Silverman: And it’s not happening. In fact not only is it not happening, it happened more before there was an internet than it’s happening now. I can tell you when Afrika Bambaataa came out with “Planet Rock” it rose to the top and I had only one or two employees working with me and we ended up selling 600,000 twelve inches. The cream rose to the top better then than it does now.

39:00 RVE: People like choices. Me, I don’t want to hear something that’s like everything else. I want to find [music] that’s different, the stuff that’s cutting-edge, and the stuff that’s changing. I mean there’s so many like generic…I mean there’s a lot stuff that just sounds generic. When you find something that’s really unique, really good, then it’s awesome. The more people you have making music the more likely that’s going to happen.

39:40 Silverman: Definitely there’s five times as many people making music now than there was 10 years ago. There should be five times as many great pieces of music coming through than ever. But the opposite is true. [...] In 2008 there were 1,500 releases that sold over 10,000 units. In 2009 that number dropped to 1,300. In 2008 there were about 200 artists who broke 10,000 for the first time. Less than eight of them were DIY artists that broke on their own or on very small indie labels. [... ] Eight artists breaking on brand-new or on their own labels is pathetic!

41:50 Silverman: Using samples, moving around samples, and working with Garage Band is kind of like the musical equivalent of color by numbers. [...] You don’t have to be able to play an instrument really. You don’t have to be an amazing engineer. You don’t have to go into a studio and know how mic’s work. Anyone can do it. It’s a two-edged sword. On one edge it gives power to the people and on the other edge it gives power to the people who have no abilities.

42:50 RVE: I’d rather have a world where anyone can make music. [...] I think stuff gets filtered by people’s friends. I think people say “hey did you listen to this?” I think that’s still going on but I think it’s going on Facebook and in text messages—I think it’s still going on in person too but it’s also happening on Facebook [...] because it’s easy to share stuff. I think the stuff that’s getting shared more is the stuff that has more readily available in a “content” format.

48:25 RVE: Every TED video that gets recorded goes on YouTube and is available for free…why not do that for NMS?

48:35 Silverman: You know what if I could charge $5,000 like TED charges for people that come and have a waiting list then I’d put everything up there [on YouTube].

48:55 RVE: The way I see it though it doesn’t cost you anything extra to put it on YouTube, right? Wouldn’t it be free promotion?

49:02 Silverman: If we put it on YouTube and people see that then they don’t have to come to the conference. Then it does cost me something because our numbers will go down even further and we won’t be able to afford to do the conference.

49:17 RVE: The New York one [last summer] sold out, right?

49:20 Silverman: It sold out but it sold out at such a low price. [...] It’s a marginal business. Let’s put it this way. Nobody makes money at the New Music Seminar.

52:50 RVE: I just feel like instead of listening to those baby-boomer generation executives I’d rather listen to their kids because I think that’s where you’re really going to learn stuff.

53:03 Silverman: I hear you but nobody’s going to pay to hear their kids talk [at NMS].

// NMS NYC 2010 and NMS LA 2011 both sold out. I think unleashing all the keynotes on YouTube would increase attendance—do you? Who’d you like to see speak at the next NMS?