History is made today as the UK’s first “mobile only” single is announced by mobile media company 3. The single "Stop Me", by Planet Funk will be released on 8 May 2006. This first for the UK market comes as 3 celebrates the millionth audio track download in just four months since the launch of the service, and soon after being named ‘Best Digital Music Service’ at the Music Week awards.

This breakthrough follows the trend of bands using new media like the internet to build a fanbase before ‘coming from nowhere’ to top the charts. These “blog bands” such as Nizlopi, Arctic Monkeys (both had number 1 hits) and more recently OK Go (whose £13 video has been the most downloaded video on the internet) have shown that artists are adopting technology to break their music, rather than following a traditional promotional route.

Planet Funk is taking this concept one step further by releasing their debut single in the UK on the 3 mobile network, following their success on 3’s sister music service in Italy. The track will be available exclusively to 3’s 3.5 million customers in the UK .

With average sales of over 200,000 tracks per month, 3’s audio service has made up over 53% of mobile track downloads since the start of 2006, according to the Official Charts Company (OCC), the body responsible for compiling the UK charts.

Alex Neri of Planet Funk said: “Releasing "Stop Me" on 3 makes perfect sense for us. People’s musical habits are changing and millions of people now effectively have a record shop in their pocket 24 hours a day. We know that 3’s customers are huge music fans and releasing "Stop Me" solely on their network opens up our music to a whole new audience of over 3.5 million people in the UK.”