Net, Blogs and Rock'n'Roll

University of Death by Sean McManus: A Review

There's a pivotal scene in University of Death where the muso-technology geek at the heart of the story struggles to persuade the venal record industry boss to buy-in to a groundbreaking new scheme that will change the industry forever. To accomplish this, the geek plays the boss a new composition, which has been engineered to embody the latter's favourite musical tropes — to push his buttons, if you will.

Without giving too much away, it works. The boss, called Clive in a knowing nod to a well-known industry mogul [Sean assures me no such nod was intended and any similarity to persons living or dead is entirely coincidental…], takes the bait and employs the geek to create more of these personalised sure-fire hits. Not just to create them, in fact, but to seed them virally through targeted online discussions.

I felt an uncanny doubling of the impact of this scene. The book touches on so many of the themes that interest me, and which I wrote about in Net, Blogs and Rock'n'Roll, that I began to wonder if a very clever geek had written it for the express purpose of pushing my buttons. It had, after all, reached me via a well-targeted email from a software bot claiming to be a writer called Sean McManus, who comes complete with a convincing back story.

Here's a couple of examples of how this canny piece of Artificial Intelligence works. It has taken my old blog post about listener behaviours and reframed it in part of the caustic portrait of record company cynicism:

Further reading: notes and bibliography

At university, my supervisor used to say that he would always read the references at the end of a research paper first. His reasoning was that this gave you an easily skimmable indication of both the coverage of the paper and its influences. I'm not sure that many people share this attitude, but if you do, you'll be interested to see that I've put both of the Notes and the Bibliography of Net, Blogs and Rock'n'Roll online.

It's probably more likely that you'll find these useful if you're one of the growing masses who have read the book, and would like easy connections to the articles and books that I mentioned in it. The notes are all hyperlinked, so you don't have to copy out URLs from the back of the book, just click the link to go there directly. Ditto with the bibliography, which has links to further details of each book on LibraryThing and Amazon.com.

Earning commission on word-of-mouth recommendations: Amazon aStores

Word-of-mouth is a powerful and effective way of promoting products. You can't control it, but can you encourage it and harness its energy?

One of the things that makes word-of-mouth effective is that it's perceived to be based on authentic and commercially disinterested opinion. So, as soon as you sense that I stand to profit from you acting on my recommendation, you become more wary of my recommendation and less likely to act on it. (I've written about this in the context of blog marketing on my DJ Alchemi blog.)

In the music area, a couple of initiatives have started, with mixed receptions. Weedshare has been running a scheme for several years now, which encourages you to share digital music files with your friends by email, instant messenger or your website. They can listen to each file three times for free, but then have to pay to enable unlimited plays. If they do pay, you get a commission. It seems like a transparent model, and fairly simple in broad outline (though I think it gets complex in the details). The Digital Music News blog and associated comments give a mixture of opinions. It's fair to say that Weedshare hasn't exactly taken off and hit the mainstream, but that's possibly because (a) it has no major label music, (b) it uses Windows Media files (incompatible with iPods) with DRM, and (c) on the receiving end, illegal peer-to-peer sharing is more attractive, because there's no payment.

Dating and discovery (and snobbery)

The Guardian's blog reports a survey suggesting that people may be better disposed to smiling at or talking to people who they see reading a well-respected book. 'Well-respected' in this context apparently means the classics (e.g. Thomas Hardy or Jane Austen, as long it doesn't have a 'now a major TV series' splash on the cover), followed by modern literary fiction like Zadie Smith. Dan Brown and John Grisham are, apparently, the book-snooping equivalent of garlic breath: a turn-off unless the other person has read/eaten them recently too.

According to this account of the YouGov study, 2% of respondents — and 4% of men — had asked a stranger on a date after liking the look of their book, while 6% had asked the readers personal questions.

If you discover people via the sophisticated books they read, can you also discover books via their attractive readers? My instinct is that you can. One no-messing, pragmatic comment on The Guardian's blog puts it, "Anyone who leaves the '3 for 2' stickers on their books is a no-no. But let's face it, if someone's fit you'll give them the benefit of the doubt anyway." So if you were initially wary of the latest Douglas Coupland, but you saw someone you fancied reading it on your regular commute to work, that might give you the nudge you needed to read the book after all.