popEx

The pop music stock exchange
In the early 1990s the NME ran a fantasy band competition.  Entrants could use a fixed budget to hire their own imaginary supergroup, and would then be awarded points based on the real performance of their band members in terms of chart success, NME cover pictures, news headlines etc.  The feature only ran a couple of times, but sooner or later someone was going to take the idea and put it online.  popEx founder Pauly had the necessary knowledge of both the web and pop music, having previously run an ezine called $OLD OUT.   "About two years ago I tried to recreate the NME's Fantasy Pop Group League thing that they ran in the paper.  I got a few bits working, but then I realised that the fantasy leagues aren't really interactive, so I came up with the idea of being able to change your portfolio around every day, and the stock exchange idea came about."

popEx went live at it's current address early in 1999, but things were fairly quiet for a while.  As Pauly explains,  it wasn't until the start of this year that things really took off.  "When popEx went professional at new years we had a big redesign and a huge boost of users, so real all new popEx has been running since then."  And since New Year the site has become a phenomenon, having started the year with around 1000 registered users, the number had grown to 7000 by the end of February, and is currently growing at a rate of 1000 users a week.  The spread of interest in the site shows little sign of slowing, and it was recently reviewed by national newspaper The Independent, who made it their website of the day.

But the huge success of popEx is made more amazing by the fact that the site is run by only two people.  Pauly continues to handle the technical side of things on a day to day basis, whilst Whiz is responsible for the look and feel of the site.  There is a third member of the team - Whiz's dog Sammy, who appears on the website offering a mixture of trading tips and woofs.

It's BLUDDY GRATE
So claims the popEx website, and rightly so, though Pauly freely admits that the words BLUDDY GRATE were borrowed from elsewhere.  "I can't take credit for this, I steal everything from other people, mostly pop star MJ Hibbett."

So how exactly do you play?  Well, you start out with five thousand pounds to invest in pop band shares.   You can buy and sell at any time but, as in the real world, the value of your shares can go down as well as up.  "In the dark days of popEx, when there were about a dozen people playing, things used to go wrong all the time.  I remember the price of Bjork going up to several thousand pounds...  now that things are fixed (fingers crossed) prices don't move that much.  Sometimes you see a run on a share, today it's Venga Boys, they're up 20%, occasionally shares will double overnight, but you know that in the next few days those same shares are likely to PLUMMET!"  Of course the cash is all imaginary, but it's amusing to imagine a future where the real stock exchange is populated with pop music fans trained on popEx.

With tales of internet made millionaires on the news every week I asked Pauly if he would be next.   "A SQUILLIONAIRE more like, it was all part of the deal I made to sell my soul."