We’ve had many discussions about the music business here on The Punch-In, whether it be about the future of the biz or about how to make money making music. One underlying theme is that while it seems it is becoming harder and harder for small bands to make decent money, it is actually becoming easier and easier for those bands to promote their music with the advent of MySpace, YouTube, Blip.fm, Last.fm, Facebook, Twitter, etc. Now, a new site called Headliner.fm has been launched and is essentially a real-time social media recommendation exchange for artists and bands that allows bands help each other.
It’s tough for an upstart band to make it big, and since all young musicians are in roughly the same boat, Headliner.fm suggests that bands should work together. Headliner.fm makes that happen by helping bands promote one another on their Twitter, Facebook and MySpace profiles.
When a band signs up at Headliner.fm, they’re given a number of “Band Bucks” proportionate to their social media presence — the more followers a band has on Twitter, for example, the more Band Bucks they’ll get. They can use those Band Bucks to request that other bands give them a quick shout-out on their social media accounts. Each time they give another band a shout-out (up to three per day) they’re given more Band Bucks. This video explains the basic concept:
headliner.fm Sizzle Reel from headliner.fm on Vimeo.
Of course, bands have to accept promotion requests from other bands, so they can control what kinds of shout-outs are hitting their feeds. Once they accept, Headliner.fm automatically handles the scheduling and the posting. Bands can also get band bucks for inviting other artists to join the site.
Headliner.fm offers analytics tools to track how much of an impact the promotions are making. Bands must be smart about the bands they do promotions with by targeting audiences they think would also be interested in their music. For example, it’s probably a safe assumption that Metallica’s feeds aren’t the optimal place to promote a classical Folk band.
What do you think about Headliner.fm?