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In a long introductory post that Friday, I laid out the case:

[W]e are headed into SXSW with the serious danger that Peter Bjorn and John will be turned into the “buzz” or “breakout” band of the festival. . . . As much as we would all like to just ignore the whole “buzz band” phenomenon—to chalk it up (correctly) to the meaningless machinations of a press in need of a story—the fact is that those decisions matter. They matter in terms of what bands get played, what bands get signed, what bands get associated with indie rock as a genre. Whether we like it or not, the sound of the “buzz band” gets attributed to us, in terms of what we supposedly like. We, the indie-rock fans, suffer when the buzz band is bad. Which brings us to the question: Do we want Peter Bjorn and John to be hailed as the standard bearers for a whole genre of music? And the answer is: NO WAY. . . . “Young Folks” was catchy and harmless, but this band is not a significant band. Peter Bjorn and John must be stopped.

And we can do it. . . . We make these bands ourselves, online, through our posts, listens, downloads, and links. If we want to take them down, we can.

This was precisely the theory that I thought the Stop Peter Bjorn and John experiment could address. I knew that Internet buzz was not only creating these waves and waves of short-lived bands, but was doing so in a basically arbitrary fashion: the Columbia music study (addressed in chapter 1) made this fact clear, that in terms of popular bands created in social networks, we were living in only one of many possible worlds. Which raised an important question: could antibuzz spread through the same channels as buzz, with correspondingly negative effects?

In retrospect, I concede that my experiment might not have been ideally designed. The centerpiece of the campaign was to be an anti- Peter Bjorn and John rally, held outside Austin’s Waterloo Records on the following Friday at 3:00 p.m., when the band was slated to make an in-store appearance there. All attendees were to bring a sign, or wear a shirt, that expressed their feelings against the band. “What I plan to do,” I wrote, “is write ‘PBJ’ on a piece of duct tape and put it over my mouth”—explaining in a parenthetical that “[t]he idea is that trying to make PBJ into a breakout band is essentially silencing those of us who hate the band.” A fake “update” at the bottom of the post suggested that “30-40” people had already e-mailed me to say they would be attending, and I added enough fake comments to suggest this might be plausible.

Real commenters began to trickle in over that weekend, and then, at the beginning of the following week, bona fide nanonarrativity was achieved: on Monday the site was picked up by Gawker.com, and then by its sister music site, Idolator, and then, over the next few days, by the websites of Entertainment Weekly, the Los Angeles Times, Mother Jones, and amNew York, as well as numerous smaller blogs, the adoption/ abandonment curve taking its familiar shape:

FIG. 2-4—STOP PETER BJORN AND JOHN

Stop Peter Bjorn and John had created buzz. But what, exactly, was the content of that buzz? Had it done anything to unsettle the trajectory of the band? Or was the site’s buzz only for itself? A few signs were encouraging. First, the site seemed to be sowing uncertainty, in a Karl Rove-like strategy: the existence of the site meant that bloggers had to write about the band’s ascendance not as a unanimous coronation but as a fraught matter. E.g., a blog called Lost in Texas, on 3/12: “Are Peter, Bjorn, and John the newest idol of the American music scene, a la Sufjan Stevens? Or is this blog right, and PB&J need to be stopped?” From the Live-Journal of 14icedbear: “i happen to tentatively like pb&j (tentatively because i haven’t really heard all that much of them yet), but i do understand being frustrated by the monumental success of a band you find to be mediocre.” Best of all, the San Francisco Chronicle’s culture blog linked to the site offhandedly in calling