Trend Spotter as Sport

The Atlantic has a fascinating article: South Korea's Hottest IPO: Boy Band, Inc.

In essence, a Korean record and entertainment company went public last week, and now has a market cap of over $300 million. Such things allow people to invest in a company, but what if you could invest in a band?

Imagine a site where you could "bet on" or invest in bands or artists. This could be just an online game site, essentially, but one that let people predict band popularity.

I think for lots of folks, the ability to quantify or show their ability to be a taste maker or trend spotter would be worth it. And there would be two ways to show how cool you were. The obvious way would be to have a high-value portfolio that showed your ability to spot the hot acts before they were hot. The less obvious way is to have a stagnant value for your portofolio, to show that you are a contrarian, uninterested in what's popular.

For the bands, it might be a vehicle for promoting new acts, letting them prove to clubs and promoters that they are indeed rising stars.

Or this could be just a silly idea - like investing in boy bands.