Byline: David McGuire
Jenny Toomey has just about had it with the unending fuss over file-sharing and illegal music downloads.
"To be honest, it's hard for me to even do this interview because I'm so bored of it. I was bored of it when we started in 2000," Toomey said between sips of a peach smoothie at the Fresh Fields grocery store near her home in northwest Washington, D.C.
By turns businesswoman, think-tank director and semi-iconic indie rocker, Toomey is spoken for; she would rather find ways to make sure independent artists can afford a meal than fret over whether music piracy is costing the entertainment industry a few million of its many billions of dollars.
"When you're focusing on the black-and-white issues, the artists are never represented in the discussion. As we continue to try to polarize people, artists aren't on the black side or the white side. The thing they really care about is getting paid, and being respected and having control of their art," said Toomey, who as former lead singer of D.C.-based indie-rock outfit Tsunami, knows what it's like to live south of the poverty line.
But her antipathy may strike some as ironic considering that Toomey will host the fourth annual Future of Music Coalition Policy Summit on Sunday and Monday at The George Washington University, an event that attracts record company executives, artists, file-sharing service hosts, lawmakers and civil libertarians.
For them, file-sharing will be a marquee issue, and Toomey's conference has become a sort of Switzerland where all sides can discuss it in a neutral environment.
"It's become a place where people want to come because there's an interest in dialogue from all sides. They've done an interesting job of making the conference a multilayered exploration of lots of different things," said John Simson, executive director of SoundExchange, a company formed
by the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) to collect music royalties on behalf of artists and record labels.
Adam Eisgrau, executive director of P2P United, a lobbying group that represents file-sharing companies like Morpheus and eDonkey, echoed Simson's assessment, though he rarely finds himself agreeing with the music industry.
"I think big tent conclaves serve a valuable and legitimate function in what can often be a supercharged rhetorical environment here inside the Beltway," Eisgrau said. "I'd say that the coalition's organizers are due a great deal of credit for representing a constituency that is often invoked by others but not represented."
The conference also draws its own share of pop music luminaries. Former Talking Heads rhythm section Tina Weymouth and Chris Frantz are scheduled for this year, as are John Flansburgh, one half of They Might Be Giants and neo-folk chanteuse Suzanne Vega. Past attendees include Chuck D. of Public Enemy and former Nirvana bassist Krist Novoselic.
Toomey said she cares more about making sure artists who don't quite enjoy the same level of stardom can make their mortgage payments and get health insurance than who wins the escalating battle between record labels and technology companies over file-sharing.
What musicians really want to know, judging by some of the agenda items this year, is how they can get better licensing deals so they can make their work available through legal services like Apple's iTunes and how to keep their audiences in the face of radio station consolidation.
Drummer "Pat Thetic" of Pittsburgh punk band Anti-Flag (another Future of Music panelist) summed up the independent artist's ambivalent relationship with free downloading.
"Our goal is to find people who might be interested in what we're doing -- in that sense the openness of the Internet and the downloading of records is good," he said. "The gray area is that as artists ... we're one step away from working at the Kmart. There has to be some sort of balance [because] we need to make a living and need to be able to feed our families."
Thetic (he declined to give his "Christian" name) said he's pleased to have the opportunity to get his message out to people who would not otherwise get the chance to hear him. "I'm going to be the token punk rock dude with the funny hair talking about these issues, which is good for us since a lot of the time we're dismissed because we have funny hair."
Bringing together voices from a range of backgrounds already has helped the coalition achieve some of its goals, Toomey said.
She recounted how the RIAA, after a contentious panel on SoundExchange at the 2001 Future of Music summit, spun off the group -- formed to collect royalties from the fledgling web, cable and satellite radio markets -- and added more artists to its board.
"[SoundExchange is] not perfect by a long shot, but it is 300 percent better than an in-house collection outfit run by the RIAA," Toomey said.
Simson said that the summit was instrumental in setting that shift in motion.
Despite Toomey's sick-of-it-all feelings on music piracy, Eisgrau predicted that the Future of Music Coalition could help resolve the problem. "Artists and artist organizations could prove to be the sleeping giant that if awakened could become something rare in Washington, and that is a catalyst for rapid and positive change."
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