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Wednesday, June 12, 2002 |
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EULAs enforceable? "The EULA is that list of legal jargon you have to agree to before you install various software products on your computer. Computer users rarely read and understand the entire EULA before they click 'accept' to continue the installation. This precedent implies that you can be held bound to that agreement as if you had read and understood it when you clicked on that button. Millions of Americans are potentially affected."
Via Swaine. |
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Matt bought a CD. Actually not one but three CD's. This totally unprecedented event in the annals of the music industry has reasons. Matt's notes are worth reading because IMHO they are a sign of where the music industry is going. For a long time I was pretty convinced that DRM would rule the day. But now it is becoming clear that a) people really really hate actual DRM technology; b) taking it as far as it needs to go to be effective would cripple the US computer industry relative to foreign competitors; and c) there are other approaches to getting musicians paid. The answer I hope will evolve is a world in which most music is not DRM'd, but people buy it for the sake of convenience over pirate solutions, while the artists also offer assorted other incentives such as those Matt desribes (and that helped induce him to buy the Tragically Hip's latest album). Star-level artists will not be required to have so many of these extra incentives because most of their profits will be made from touring -- as has always been the case. But the smaller an artist's overall audience is, the less possible it becomes to make a profit from touring because the number of cities where there is enough fan density to support a profitable concert goes down correspondingly (while travel expenses stay constant). Touring just can't support enough small-audience artists, so there will be more special favours to fans to get them to pay. The Hip are pointing in the direction things will go.
I suspect one manifestation of this will be more direct contact between fans and artists over the Internet, which provides a means for direct two-way communication including video with no physical risk or inconvenience to the artist. Small-audience artists will be able to interact with a higher percentage of their audiences this way and thus benefit more from it, proportionally, than mega-stars can. Fans will pay for this kind of direct access. |
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Sorry for the long delay between updates. We're working on a grant proposal to the NSF and it's been all-consuming. The mathematics behind EM has possible uses way beyond the music sphere and we are looking to the grant to get help in developing it further. The application is due TODAY so things will start returning to normal soon.
A side-effect of this process is a lot of text that will be reusable in other contexts such as talking to the venture capital community, etc. |
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