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Name: Headliner.fm

Quick Pitch: Headliner is a real-time social media recommendation exchange for artists and bands. Genius Idea: It's tough for an upstart band to make it big, and since all you young musicians are in roughly the same boat, so why not work together? Headliner.fm makes that happen by helping bands promote one another on their Twitter, Facebook and MySpace profiles.

When you sign your band up at Headliner.fm, you're given a number of "Band Bucks" proportionate to your social media presence — the more followers you have on Twitter, for example, the more Band Bucks you'll get. You can use those Band Bucks to request that other bands give you a quick shout-out on their social media accounts.

Each time you give another band a shout-out (you can do three per day) you're given more Band Bucks. This video explains the basic concept.

Bands have to accept promotion requests from other bands, so you can control what kinds of shout-outs are hitting your feeds. Once you accept, Headliner.fm automatically handles the scheduling and the posting — just in case you might forget to do it yourself. You can also get band bucks for inviting other artists to join the site.

Headliner.fm offers analytics tools so you can track how much of an impact your promotions are making. Be smart about the bands you do promotions with by targeting audiences you think would also be interested in your music. For example, it's probably a safe assumption that Diddy's feeds aren't the optimal place to promote your old-fashioned Bluegrass band.

Speaking of Diddy, there are a few big artists on the site, including Travie McCoy and The Hives. Most of the thousands of members are smaller groups, though.

Image courtesy of iStockphoto, Jan_Kowalski

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