One of the initial pain points (and the primary reason we went with the one-question format) was to drive at decisions, not passive information gathering.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Push_poll

Are you aware of this? Is that something you want to be associated with?

However, to your point: No, as an artist, you DON’T get to decide how your work is used once you produce and sell it. At no point in history has that been the case. If I buy a painting, the artist doesn’t get to come to my house and decide where they want it hung, whether I can let me friends see it or what happens when I am tired of it. It is mine, I bought it. In fact, even if I take pictures of it and show my friends, I have not violated the copyright of that artist. Even if I put it up on a public walkway or outside my house – that’s my right, I bought it. Re-defining rights to be those retained after purchase is a relatively new concept and is one that was created explicitly to enrich a few at the cost to society.

Copyright exists for the promotion of science and the useful arts, for the benefit of society (see: US Constitution, Article 1, Section 8, Clause 8). It does not exist to guarantee an income to artists, and makes no mention of music at all – it refers explicitly to “writings and discoveries”. Your argument that you should get to control what others do with your works is not supported by history, logic, or any other creative industry. It is a sense of entitlement.

Although you can use circles to restrict what you’re saying to interested parties, I don’t necessarily think that’s the best approach. I think it’s better to post stuff to the widest audience of people who I’m comfortable seeing it. Once I do that, I can then depend on my readers to categorize my posts in their own circles, and they’ll use Google’s tools to determine how often they want to see my content. That approach is simpler, and reaches almost the same effect.

I think the Google+ Circles model is slightly flawed: How do I know that a person I put in a circle actually wants to receive the information I’m publishing to that circle? With close friends you probably know, but Google seems more like Twitter where the people that follow you are not necessarily social friends. In that case, when you add people to a circle you are pushing posts to people that may not want to receive it.

Pinterest nailed it in my opinion – the user decides what to receive.