Saturday night at a secret location in east London and the sweetheart of the music press, the feisty MC Shystie, is on a stage in the subterranean Tardis Studio in the fashionable quarter of Clerkenwell.
The secret gig is being hosted not by the 20-year-old's record company, but by the mobile operator 02. To help signal the connection between music and mobiles, a novel idea of inviting the audience to send text messages to the diminutive rapper has been devised. Shystie reads the texts from a screen on the stage and uses the suggestions to help improvise her act. Her rapid-fire raps echo the rat-a-tat-tat tapping of text messages from the packed dance floor.
"I have two phones," says Shystie a few days earlier in a recording studio beneath the Heal's department store in Tottenham Court Road. "One for business and one for my friends. I store my lyrics in my Nokia. If I'm on tour or sitting around waiting and lyrics come into my head, I just tap them into my phone, save them and when I go home, I incorporate them into my actual songs."
The Shystie campaign typifies the newer, subtler type of mobile marketing campaign aimed at Britain's youth. The 300-strong audience gained entry by text message and each is now added to the operators' mailing lists. It is a world away from the serious image projected by O2's predecessor, BT Cellnet.
Shystie is surprisingly complicit with the marketing campaign. She is upfront about her contract with the mobile operator, product placing the brand within the first few minutes of our interview. Not bad for a girl who has yet to release her first album.
As alcohol is flowing at the Tardis Studio, everyone at the gig is over 18. O2 says it is using Shystie to promote its music download service to its core demographic of 18-26 year olds. But according to the latest data from the mobile industry, the indirect recipients may be people much younger.
Thanks to the Stewart Commission report of 2001, it is against the mobile operators' formal code of conduct to market phones to the under 16s. But according to a recent report, the fastest growing sector is the under nines - school kids.
New research from Mobile Youth - a mobile telecoms consultancy - found that 700,000 (20%) of primary school children own mobile phones and that the under 10s "represent the fastest-growing segment of mobile phone ownership within Britain".
"They are the key fashion accessory which no self respecting child can do without," says the report. It predicts that by 2006, more than one million primary school kids (a third of all five-to-nine year olds) will own mobiles.
"For very young children, mobiles are like toys and it's all about having the best in the playground," says Wyndham Lewis, of Mobile Youth. "The older generation is more interested in the applications and cementing their peer group around it.
"As the market saturates, nine year olds become the only people who don't have mobile phones."
Mobile operators, especially Virgin, O2 and Vodafone, are developing packages that are likely to tempt the young. Virgin uses teen idol Christina Aguilera in its recent TV advertisements, while Vodafone has signed Robbie Williams.
"Youth represents a key market for us," admits Glen Manoff, communications director of 02. "It is crucial for two reasons. First, they are newcomers. Older people who haven't bought a mobile are not likely to come in now. Second, along with the business market, they like to try new services. But we don't market to younger kids."
No one is suggesting the mobile operators are targeting children in their campaigns. But some analysts believe that each needs to attract an ever-younger generation of customers as they offer the greatest potential to grow data services.
Just look at the leading data services in the UK: text messaging, ringtones, Java games and downloadable music - not one is a serious business application. The implicit understanding within the mobile world is that it is kids who will drive the data services the mobile operators need to drive up revenue now that most adults have a mobile phone.
Adopting and adapting mobile phone technology are skills that come naturally to two young musicians from north-east London. Ironik, 16 and his mate D.Dark, 15, use their mobiles to create ringtones. Locked out from the expensive download market, the youngsters make ringtones and share them with friends. "I use the phone's internal composer to compose music," says Ironik. "It's pretty easy, really."
But is this such a bad thing? According to Steve Gordon, of Twice is Nice, a nightclub promoter turned "urban" marketing guru, mobile phones often act as a "gateway" technology that prepares Britain's youth for the online world they are born into. "It's a creative tool," he explains. "Already, there are tracks played on pirate radio that were composed on mobile phones."
So are the mobile operators being disingenuous when they say they are not targeting the youth market? Just tune into MTV to see how many ads for mobiles and services there are. Or visit any playground in Britain and you see that kids and phones go together like jelly and ice cream.
As the science-fiction visionary William Gibson opined: "The street always finds its own use for this stuff."
