Legal issues

One of the reasons I've not done much work on this site thus far is the legal complications. My understanding is that for my own protection I need to establish a legal entity such that if somebody is unsatisfied with what my site is doing my personal well being is not threatened. My personal beliefs are largely negative towards the legal industry and I could rant for days about it, so I won't go down that path unless I get rant-y. ... which happens sometimes so I apologize.

But more specifically I worry about the music industry's resistance to change, and their legal response to anything new. My personal beliefs about how the world should work aside, I do not want to get sued for something I am not guilty of, because the cost of defending myself will be well above and beyond what most people consider reasonable.

Obviously, various entertainment folks are heavily invested in the current methodology of the industry. The legacy players have their part in things, and have helped serve the goals of society and music in the past, but my belief is that the present opens up all sorts of new methods that should help creators be more productive and add to the overall benefit of society and any resistance to this is selfish; so I will do my best to prepare myself for what I assume is an inevitable legal assault against my character and well being.

The first step in this is not doing too much work on the site, or enabling features that could potentially draw ire. So, apologies for the four people who have interest in this point, but I am not ready yet. And given that I have a full time job, I do not know how best to estimate when I will be there.

so, the goals of the site...

Mission statement:

Help enable artists to produce, and consumers to consume art.

Goals:

Recommend relevant music to people in a way that they appreciate. Allowing no recommendation playlist setup and general searching over a generated index of available music the user owns, as well as music shared via a variety of platforms, hopefully integrating youtube, soundcloud, myspace, and other, hopefully all integrated together such that a playlist can play seamlessly, but realistically this may prove difficult, using a select set of platforms and trying to create the same lists across them may be a goal, still investigating integration options,

Artists:

Really at the end of the day, not starving is the first priority. But secondarily, demonstrating value, enabling a method for advertising non infinite goods. Techdirt.com writes extensively about 'connecting with fans' and providing a 'reason to buy' and is fairly in line with what I am thinking of here.

Next thing related to creating art is tools and assistance. Hopefully with a social network related to music artists will reach out to other artists in their genre to help forward the progress of their art. Not to sound like too much of a hippie.

Thirdly, Id like to help enable artists to book venues. Hearing a story about my friend sending out thousands of messages to venues on the east coast trying to book a tour sounded terrible, and there is a better way. But, its obviously complicated and requires a lot of help. I mean ... as a geek, my understanding is that scheduling is an np complete problem, however you just need to prune down the search space, ...  probably not best to send an indie band to a metal bar ... although who knows maybe you have a lot of fans there. Point being, actually connecting with your fans would enable you to locate them better and target the right venues to have shows which will generate attendance. </ramble>

after that little rant I guess its best that I just sit and think for a bit before going forward.

fp

Just seeing what I can do playing with things.... figure first post hilarity whatever.

*edit was basically just checking how fast I could redirect a subdomain to a blog to demonstrate to my gf-fiance how easy it was.