Rumblefish for Books

Rumblefish

I have been reading more the last couple of months. I was working so I thought is was okay to splurge on a few used paperbacks for $5 or $10. I had been restricting myself to the bargain bins, but my luck at picking up something readable hasn't been that great. I used to go to the library, but after repeated visits to find they were closed, I gave up. (Yeah, yeah, I know, plan ahead. Not one of my better skills.)

The big issue though is finding books I enjoy reading. Some books will suck me in and I won't come up until I've finished it. Other books I can read a bit at a time and will eventually finish. Lot's of books I will discard after a chapter or sometimes just a page.

Several months ago I went to presentation by the founder of Rumblefish (no, not the movie). Rumblefish is a unique kind of hybrid. They do sonic branding and they also do commercial music licensing. They have a bunch of music and a streamlined licensing procedure, which is so much better than existing methods that I expect a big shake up in this business.

The big thing about Rumblefish though is the way they categorize music. As an example, Mr. Anthony put up four automobile logos, and then played four clips of music and asked the audience to choose which clip went with which brand. We had no trouble. One brand was sporty, one was luxurious, one was, I think, economical, and we could instantly tell which tune went with which brand. These were not clips from popular music either. They were specially composed for this purpose. That was one of Rumblefish's selling points: they could come up with a tune that would suit whatever mood or emotion you wanted to convey, and you wouldn't have to use an expensive popular tune to do it. This is a side benefit for musicians: someone has to write and perform that music.

(As an aside, have you ever wondered who picked some of the popular tunes for some of the car ads you see? Some of them are just baffling. Never mind, I'm just an old fuddy-duddy. Back to our regularly scheduled program.)

So anyway, back to books. I'm thinking that someone must be doing something like that for books. I mean, there are a bunch of book worms out there, and some really smart people, surely someone has come up with a better scheme for categorizing books than "best seller" or "murder mystery". I mean Dan Brown's The DaVinci Code was a best seller, but it was a terrible book. Not a bad screenplay, but a terrible book. Or maybe all the publishing houses have their own secret classification systems, and they just aren't telling anyone about it.

Update January 2017 replaced missing image.