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.

“If you want to build a brand, you should own the .COM domain.”
–Chris Vinson/Bandzoogle.com

I consider my URL selection of virtualmusic.tv as a minor fail. Of course when I launched the site in July 2009 I thought it was brilliant, but truly, only hindsight is 20/20. Last summer a conversation with Bandzoogle founder Chris Vinson helped confirmed in my mind that the URL choice of virtualmusic.tv was not ideal for the core reason above—it’s no .COM.

There are of course plenty of .TV urls that work well: e.g. motherboard.tv, jawbone.tv, or justin.tv. Many people like .TV for video sites because it’s the abbreviation for television. Yet the .TV extension is actually the country extension for Tuvalu—a tiny group of islands in the Pacific that even smarter-than-5th-grader adults can’t locate on a map.

Aside from the extension, there are other issues. Due to MMORPGs, people increasingly associate the word “virtual” with virtual worlds, which is not what this site is about. This site is about online music culture and the technology that surrounds it. It’s about pushing the music industry forward.

Doesn’t the name ‘Music Flux’ align better with the content? Music culture and business will always be in a state of flux, right? (Other ideas?)

Like ‘digital music,’ the phrase ‘virtual music’ is somewhat of a generic word pair, making it hard to show up at the top of Google search results. One solid formula for a strong unique URL is:

(keyword) + (2nd word or keyword not typically phrased with 1st word) + .COM

e.g. ticket + fly + .COM

e.g. band + zoogle + .COM

e.g. sound + cloud + .COM

A name change can be a damaging blow if executed poorly or done for the wrong reasons. I’ve tried here to present a solid case for a URL change. I think musicflux.com is more descriptive, unique, memorable, and stronger as a brand identity. Do you? I’d really appreciate your input in the poll below and in the comments…because I don’t want to F it up. (Note: Functionality-wise the change for readers would be pretty seamless, as all existing links and feeds would redirect.)

Thank you! // More end of the year 2010 analysis is on deck.

Update 1/17/2010: We’re not changing it.

The median price point on RocketHub…and other crowdfunding platforms for that matter…is 20 bucks. … Make your $20 price point really jump off the shelf. –Brian Meece, RocketHub co-founder.

Crowdfunding website RocketHub was launched in January 2010 by three musicians/entrepreneurs—Brian Meece, Vladimir Vukicevic, and Jed Cohen. (tonic.com)  Meece was speaking above in his August 2010 interview with CDBaby podcaster Kevin Breuner. Meece continued with more details:

“The single most popular price point on RocketHub, by far, across the board, is $20. So what that means is make your $20 price point really jump off the shelf. Make it really exciting, make it really fun, because that’s what you’re going to move the most of likely. Another very popular price point is the $100 price point, which I also found very intriguing. The $100 price point typically are folks that have built up a lot of trust, or have been following you a little longer. They may be inner-circle folks, you know, your Uncle Bobby from Texas that loves everything that you do and buys 20 of your CD’s everytime they come out, but, you know just loves the fact that he’s got a nephew who’s making records. That’s where he’s probably gonna’ land. You’d be surprised who lands there, but it’s a very, very popular price point. … As a result the average contribution, it hovers day to day, but it’s in about the upper $50s. $57–$59 is the average across the board. So that’s very interesting because when we look at that average number, we could start to say if I wanna’ hit $500, then I need about 8–12 people to really hit that number—not a lot.” (CDBaby Podcast #098)

Guided by my own DIY business rule #6, I don’t need to waste time or money researching market price points for people who buy music. There’s already a company who’s perfected them—Apple:

2010 Apple iPod price comparison (source: apple.com)

Earlier this year Shamal Ranasinghe (@shamalman) presented marketing data from TopSpin Media at MIDEM 2010 in Cannes, France in series of slides. This one displays the advantage of selling at every price point—everything from frequent cheap buys to rare premium package deals:

“Consider Premium Offers”—slide 11. (source: Topspin Media)

On tour » another issue to consider is that location changes value/price.

Graphics: iPod, Topspin, and ‘price shuffle‘ graphics were remixed by RVE.

Photo: bjornkeizers/flickr.

10 seconds to engage someone—to impress them.

In his research for Futurehit.DNA, Jay Frank discovered an impressive trend: Shorter song intros lead to better sales. “2/3 of bestselling songs have an intro that’s less than 7 seconds.” The average intro length for Top 25 songs is 6.6 seconds. “You really have 10 seconds to engage people.” Get to the hook. “Make it impactable.”

Frank stated that “people are going to come to you first through song.” Through Google. Essentially, bands can expect fans to find them through song names and lyric clips because that’s how fans search and discover. “Make sure you search your own song.” That is, search the title before you release it suggested both Jay Frank and Ariel Hyatt. Based on the initial search results an artist can tweak their titles for SEO.

NMS NYC 2010 | Day 1 | First Movement: The Next Music Business Unveiled
LTR: Ariel Hyatt (moderator/Ariel Publicity), Jay Frank (Futurehit.DNA), Gwen Lipsky (SoundThinkingNY), Eric Garland (BigChampange), and Mike Doernberg (ReverbNation). On this slide they brought up the issue that a lot of artists are trying to monetize too early. Create, grow, and then sell. Photo: virtualmusictv/flickr.

“Don’t try to sell something if you’re trying to get fans because that’s an obstacle when what you want is their attention.” –Mike Doernberg, CEO, ReverbNation.

Even superstar Rihanna had trouble getting high in Google with “Russian Roulette” because there were already so many results for that term. What an artist can do is either make titles more unique, or, even better, tag-along existing popular search terms by using slight variations. Be clever—keep a handle on artistic integrity. Ralph Simon later pointed out that based on Google Trends, people search for ‘lyrics’ more than they search for ‘sex.’

10 seconds. You already lost me. 28 hours later a different panel, The Creative Conundrum, critiqued the three artists who made it to the Artist On The Verge finals. Only half the panel had seen the show the night before and the rest were judging based on a 10-second video clip. Were they insensitive? Yes. They were ruthless. But were they true to life? You tell me.

Sound Around: iPhone apps for bands.

Gee, Scott, what do you want to do tonight? The same thing we do every night, Steve—try to help music take over the world by building better mobile apps for bands and their fans!

In 2009, in a little place called Raleigh, North Carolina, brothers Scott and Steve Klein had been brainstorming tech startup ideas. Both were students at NC State, but with opposite majors—nearly yin and yang. Add entrepreneurial DNA, and they’re Pinky and The Brain. Scott (Brain) was preparing to graduate as a computer engineer, and his younger brother, Steve (Pinky), was studying business management/marketing. Their startup would be born, but the question was, what kind? Taking advantage of their student resources, they had access to mentoring and networking through the NCSU Engineering Entrepreneurs Program.

They started 2bros1blog.com to blog about what they learned on the startup road. Many early ideas were solutions aimed towards the university community. Scott had learned Objective-C, the programming language for iPhone apps, and they decided they really wanted to get involved with mobile apps. Everyone has a phone, and they always have it with them, right? But they needed to find the right niche. They thought about campus sports or news apps, but when they proposed building a news app for the college paper, they were met with perplexed stares. Scott and Steve realized that for their app service to fly, they needed to find people that were really interested in expanding and engaging their audience. Being music fans themselves, they took what seemed to be a logical turn that summer—towards musicians. Next stop, Sound Around.

Scott graduated in December, gave a speech, and started a job at an TransLoc—a startup that provides realtime location information to mass-transit users. He built their iPhone app. At the same time he and Steve (who was still in school and working part-time in Macaroni Grill) were developing what would soon be called Sound Around. At the turn of 2010, they took on 15 bands as closed-beta testers. In February Steve learned the ins and outs of web design and built getsoundaround.com.

With people skills and resourcefulness, they’d bootstrapped their expenses so far, but in early 2010 they got involved with TechStars in an effort to raise seed capital. In March they flew to Boulder and found themselves surrounded by like minds in the tech scene. Of 600 startups, TechStars funds only 10. Sound Around made it to the top 27 but not the final 10, and it was back to bootstrapping.

In a typical college scenario, the two brothers were living in a 4-bedroom apartment with two other students—David and A.J.—but when David moved out to live with his fiancé, Scott and Steve commandeered the empty room and converted it into a workspace—their current headquarters.

Having success with the beta apps, they started recording videos to demo the Sound Around platform, and, in the meantime started the application process for funding through another (more local) startup incubator, called LaunchBox Digital…which pretty much brings us to the present. Last night was a milestone for Sound Around. Their first apps were approved by Apple and are now live in the App Store. The party was on, but it’s only the beginning for Sound Around.

In the upcoming weeks, Sound Around will be running discount promos via Twitter. Stay in the loop: @VirtualMusictv and @getsoundaround.

Scott is on a 3-month sabbatical from his job at TransLoc to focus full-time on Sound Around. Steve would love to be able to dropout next semester and get Sound Around rolling without distractions. Funding would help them “scale faster” but with or without it they’re expecting to launch in public beta this summer. They considering finding a 3rd team member experienced in web and/or Android dev.

The ‘band apps as a service’ market is a wide-open frontier. There’s some fundamental characteristics about Sound Around that really make them stand out.

1. It’s the DIY mindset. Sound Around’s young, two-brother team is the core of all their development. They’re building it all from the ground up. By not hiring out their programming or design, they’ll be able to constantly address feedback and improve their platform. When demands of the app market change, they’ll be able to adapt the fastest.

2. Sound Around purely focused on developing apps for bands/musicians. They’re not leaving the music niche—immense as it is—and they plan on rocking it. MobBase is their only direct competition right now, and there’s plenty of room to coexist in this space.

3. In what I’ve learned about Scott and Steve, I can tell that they understand the importance of people in the mix. They plan on creating an interface for interaction—not one-way communication—and they have a lot of innovative ideas on deck.

4. Their pricing is user-focused. It’s not based on installs. Bands pay based on the number of fans that actually use the app each month. The starter $14/month plan covers 1000 unique app users per month. Above 1000 is $0.01/user until the next tier—$29/month for 5000 unique users.

5. Their mascot is a giraffe named Shirley. She’ll make you smile. :) Giraffes are a symbol of evolution, you know. She doesn’t always travel with the team of course, who’ll be attending events this summer, including Warped Tour in Charlotte, and would love to meet up.

// update // October 19, 2010 from Scott:

I know it hasn’t been very long since we officially launched back in July, but we’ve been working on something really cool behind the scenes that we’re finally ready to tell everyone about. One of our fellow local music companies, ReverbNation, has acquired Sound Around and will be moving quickly to launch the product to their more than 900,000 artists.

Steve and I are both super excited to be joining the ReverbNation team to work on providing mobile products that will continue to move the needle on acquiring new fans, and engaging existing ones on a deeper level. We’ve been heavily vested in creating useful technologies in the mobile space, and we have no doubt that these efforts will only be amplified as we move into our new roles working alongside an impressive and passionate team of individuals.

For everyone that had a hand in touching, shaping, or otherwise influencing our foray into building a product and launching our first company, we can’t thank you enough for all of the hours of mentoring, being a cheerleader, and (most importantly) bringing us down to size when we needed it.

CAUTION: When it comes to problem solving, engineers are fearless.
Graphic version: virtualmusic.tv/2010/06/10-engineering-rules/

Device Dependency

Apple continues to create a major dependence on iTunes through their mobile products—the iPod, iPhone, and iPad—and I don’t think that anything is going to “kill” iTunes without a war. iTunes is the 7-Eleven of media—it’s more convenient and expensive, but it’s closer to home. For many, the iTunes experience is ingrained behavior—a household name—and part of their daily commute so to speak.

Generation Gap

The second huge advantage Apple has is the generation gap. Older people are more likely to have money to spend, and are less likely to adopt something new—especially if it’s less convenient. For Spotify to compete stateside, it will start through today’s youth. I love the Spotify concept, its mobility, and its adaptivity. They are smart to develop/test/improve their service in one location (Europe) before attempting to roll it out in another market (U.S.)—that’s business expansion 101. I hope that Spotify becomes a hit in the U.S. mainly for the sake of the music. Who wants an iTunes monopoly?

Apple Affinity

Apple products have strong affinity, and an army of enthusiasts drinking their Slurpees. Anyone looking to compete with them has to have an equal or greater affinity, and/or introduce something totally disruptive (which Spotify has done to a degree). Spotify has game, but so does Apple, who made a calculated move with last year’s Lala acquisition. One big thing to remember is that music has always been about the experience, and it always has been.

Apple Shuttle