Napsterbot
I built a little bot using the mp3::napster module for perl, written by the omnipotent Lincoln Stein. I had read a story about Aimee Mann’s use of napster to get in touch with fans, to have them subscribe to her mailing list. A band i’m really into, Orbit, had left a major label and had a new album they were trying to promote themselves. They had had one pretty big single, which was shared by a number of people on napster. So of a weekend, I hacked together this bot that locates people sharing a song, and sends them an IM. I got in touch with the singer and guitarist for orbit, and we hashed out exactly how the bot would work, and what it would say to napster users. It just greeted them, said that we saw that they were into Orbit, and that they should visit Orbit’s webpage for free mp3s. Jeff offered to put up a special webpage as part of Orbit’s site, which greeted napster users, and offered them a bunch of free mp3s for download. in the end, we brought about 3500 people to Orbit’s site.
I think that this was really brave and cool of orbit to do, and i hope that it signals what can, with newer technologies, be accomplished with the internet for independent bands.
Anyway, without further ado, here’s the program free for you to download. if you end up using it for something cool, it’d be nice if you drop me a line, and let me know how you ended up using it.
