They Might Be Giants and DRM

by billso on Friday, 16 July 2004

One of my favorite bands, They Might Be Giants (TMBG) answers ques­tions about DRM, from MSNBC:

Q: Is this the way you see things going in the future — artists secur­ing dig­i­tal rights?

A: It was a strange nego­ti­a­tion. Extract­ing them was not as sim­ple as it sounds, and most peo­ple don’t go to the effort of hold­ing on to that stuff. I feel like in some ways we’re just a cou­ple of beats ahead of the gen­eral curve. It remains to be seen how great it will be. I wouldn’t be sur­prised if pay­ing for recorded music becomes an obso­lete idea in general.

Q: How would you eat, then?

A: That’s my prob­lem. Being a musi­cian is an unrea­son­able idea any­way. The life expectancy of a pro­fes­sional career in music is five or 10 years. That would be a long run. It’s not some­thing you do because you’re being sen­si­ble. We’ve been curi­ously blessed with an audi­ence that was inter­ested in what we’re doing in a pretty sin­cere way. It’s hard to say why we endure. I think the sad thing is that we’re going to see a lot more actors mak­ing records and the whole thing is going to seem like a bad super­provin­cial ver­sion of rock.”

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