Who We Are

FMC's Founders: Michael Bracy, Jenny Toomey, Brian Zisk, Walter McDonough

Michael Bracy Policy Director, Founding Board Member, and President of the Board of Directors [email]
Michael Bracy is a partner in the government affairs firm Bracy Tucker Brown & Valanzano. He also co-founded the Future of Music Coalition and currently serves as a board member and Policy Director and co-owns Misra, an independent record label based in Austin, Texas.

Michael is known for his policy work in front of Congress and the FCC, including media consolidation, radio regulation (including Low Power FM), and ensuring public interest principles are at the heart of the legal structures that will help dictate new technological frameworks. Michael is a recognized public advocate both for the music community and for the need for increased citizen participation in the policy process. He has testified before the Congress and the FCC, and speaks often on these issues at conferences and in the media, including CNN, MSNBC, National Public Radio, Washington Post, New York Times, Billboard and elsewhere.

Michael attended Georgetown University, where his courtship with his future wife, Kelly, began in earnest when they co-hosted a radio show on the campus station. After graduation, Kelly and Michael spent seven years in Seattle, where Michael worked in the educational communications field specializing in producing and directing live, interactive educational and government television programming. Kelly and Michael have three children, Eliza, Sophie and Owen, and live in Arlington, VA. [rev 06/2006]

Farnum Brown Treasurer, Board of Directors
Farnum Brown is a vice president and senior portfolio manager at Trillium Asset Management Corporation. With over a billion dollars of assets under management, Trillium is an internationally recognized leader in the field of progressive shareholder activism. The Company pioneered the use of shareholder rights to maximize financial return while improving corporate performance in the areas of environmental, social and media responsibility. For the past 20 years Farnum has managed investment portfolios for many of the leading progressives in the music and film industries. He is founding Chair of the Open Media and Information Companies Initiative (Open MIC) and serves on the Board of Advisors of Public Radio Capital. Farnum holds bachelors, masters and doctoral degrees from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. [rev 12/07]

Bryan Calhoun Secretary, Board of Directors
Bryan has worked in the music industry in various capacities including A&R, marketing, new media, radio promotions, business affairs and concert promotions for over 15 years. He worked at Relativity Records, RED Distribution, Warlock Records, Serchlite Music and most recently as the COO of Kanye West's GOOD Music record label. He drew upon his varied experiences and founded LMS to help indie record labels succeed. To that end, he developed specific business solutions, namely the Music Business Toolbox and LMS Financial Software. He has advised clients such as Kanye West, Ludacris, Monster Cable, MSN and Music One. Bryan has a BBA in Finance from the University of Georgia and regularly speaks at music industry conferences and at universities.

Jean Cook Interim Executive Director [email]
Jean Cook has been playing violin since 1979. She is a founder and director of Anti Social Music, a New York-based new music collective. She currently records and tours with Ida, Jon Langford, and Beauty Pill. Recent performances and recordings also include with Tom Abbs/Frequency Response, Assif Tsahar, Sabir Mateen/Juxtapositions Plus!, and Taylor Ho Bynum/Spidermonkey Strings. Jean's administrative background includes working as a publicist and curator for Washington Performing Arts Society, producing and hosting radio programs for 89.9 WKCR-FM, New York, and producing dozens of new music performance projects including a multimedia DIY opera called The Nitrate Hymnal. In 2004 Jean worked for Air Traffic Control, a political action group helping musicians to be more effective in the 2004 election cycle. She joined Future of Music Coalition to help them expand the work they do with the classical and jazz communities in 2005, and assumed the Deputy Director role in 2008.

Peter DiCola Former Research Director, now Board Member [email]
Peter DiCola is a Ph.D. candidate in economics at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. He received his J.D. magna cum laude from the University of Michigan Law School in May 2005, and was awarded the Henry M. Bates Memorial Scholarship. While in graduate school, he worked with the Future of Music Coalition as Director of Economic Analysis from 2000–2004 and served as full-time Research Director from 2005–2006. He is the co-author, with Kristin Thomson, of Radio Deregulation: Has It Served Citizens and Musicians? (2002) and the author of False Premises, False Promises: A Quantitative History of Ownership Consolidation in the Radio Industry (2006). His article “Employment and Wage Effects of Radio Consolidation” appeared as a chapter in the collection Media Diversity and Localism (Lawrence Erlbaum and Associates, 2006). He is writing his dissertation on regulation of the radio and music industries. [01/2007]

Kristen Grimm Board Member
Kristen Grimm has extensive experience conceiving, implementing and managing strategic communications campaigns. She is president of Spitfire Strategies, which provides communications solutions to support positive social change.

Prior to Spitfire, she was a fellow at the Vietnam Veterans of America Foundation (VVAF), where she worked on issues including banning landmines, reforming the death penalty and criminal justice systems, and reducing the threat of nuclear war.

Before her fellowship, Grimm was the president and chief operating officer of Fenton Communications where she oversaw a professional staff of 65, as well as managed client accounts including The Justice Project, Align Technology, World Wildlife Fund, the Aspen Institute, NRDC, and Youth Service America. While at Fenton, she wrote NOW HEAR THIS: The Nine Laws of Successful Advocacy Communications (with generous support from the David and Lucile Packard Foundation). More than 10,000 copies of the booklet were distributed in the nonprofit and foundation sectors.

She has conducted many capacity building communications trainings for nonprofits, foundations, and corporations including the Open Society Institute, Pew Charitable Trusts, Arsalyn Foundation, World Wildlife Fund, and National Association of Children's Hospitals.

Chhaya Kapadia Events Organizer [email]
Chhaya has been Future of Music Coalition's Events Organizer since January 2008. Prior to moving to Washington, DC, she spent several years coordinating tours at noted Boston roots music booking/management agency Concerted Efforts for artists such as Orchestra Baobab, Ali Farka Toure, Rokia Traore, Booker T. & The MG's, Yat-Kha and others. She has also traveled internationally tour managing Pape & Cheik and The Holmes Brothers. Chhaya's background in arts management serves her well at FMC where over the past two years, she has had a lead role in management and logistical coordination for the sixth and seventh Future of Music Policy Summits as well as numerous meetings for artists and managers. She received a BA from Emerson College with a major in Audio Engineering and was also previously an in-house engineer with WERS-FM Boston. Chhaya first began working for FMC as Operations Coordinator in May 2006.

Walter F. McDonough General Counsel and Founding Board Member [email]
Walter McDonough is the General Counsel and one of the founders of the Future of Music Coalition. Mr. McDonough is a professor of copyright law at Suffolk University Law School. He also serves as a board member on the United States performing rights society SoundExchange and the Alliance of Artist and Recording Companies. Mr. McDonough has traveled throughout North America to speak at the University of Texas Law School and the World Congress of Information Technology, the American Bar Association Annual Intellectual Property Conference, Canadian Music Week, South by Southwest, the MUTEK International Music and Technology Conference, the Harvard Law School Berkman Center Signal/Noise 2k5 Conference, the Columbia Journal Of Law And the Arts Symposium, the University of Alberta, Music and the Entertainment Industry Educators Association Annual Conference, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and the Harvard Law School Journal of Law & Technology.

Mr. McDonough is also an attorney who represents, among others, the Dresden Dolls and Mission of Burma. Mr. McDonough was an associate at Carroll Guido & Groffman in New York City, one of America's leading music law firms, a former assistant Massachusetts Attorney General and a law clerk for the Honorable Edward F. Harrington of the United States Court for the District of Massachusetts. [rev 12/2006]

Casey Rae-Hunter Communications Director [email]
Casey Rae-Hunter is a musician, recording engineer, journalist and editor. His music writing has appeared in Dusted, Signal to Noise, Grooves, Seven Days Newspaper and Washington City Paper. He attended university for jazz guitar at 17, but spent most of the 1990s toiling in the punk, hardcore and indie trenches, fronting and/or playing guitar for a list of bands too long/insignificant to mention. He made the transition to studio rat around 2000. Since then, he has mixed and mastered numerous releases in genres ranging from power-pop to technical metal. As a music journalist and critic, he has profiled some of the leading figures in both underground and mainstream music, including Antony & the Johnsons, Mike Watt, The Books, Lindsey Buckingham, Animal Collective, Jolie Holland and Built to Spill. He currently records under the moniker The Contrarian.

Derek Sivers Board Member
Derek Sivers is best known as the founder of CD Baby. A professional musician (and circus clown) since 1987, Derek started CD Baby by accident in 1998 when he was selling his own CD on his website, and friends asked if he could sell theirs, too.  CD Baby was the largest seller of independent music on the web, with over $100M in sales for over 150,000 musician clients.  After he won the 2003 World Technology Award, Esquire Magazine's annual "Best and Brightest" cover story said, "Derek Sivers is changing the way music is bought and sold... one of the last music-business folk heroes." In 2008, Derek sold CDBaby to focus on his new ventures to benefit musicians, including his new company MuckWork where teams of efficient assistants help musicians do their "uncreative dirty work". His current projects and writings are all at sivers.org.

Kristin Thomson Education Director [email]
Kristin Thomson is a community organizer, social policy researcher, entrepreneur and musician. After graduating with a BA in Sociology from Colorado College in 1989, Thomson moved to Washington, DC where she worked for two years as a national action organizer for the National Organization for Women. She left NOW in 1992 to make a full-time commitment to Simple Machines, an independent record label she co-ran with Jenny Toomey. Over the label's 8-year history, Simple Machines released over 70 records and CDs, published the Mechanic's Guide to Putting Out Records, Cassettes, and CDs, and organized three high-profile music festivals in Washington, DC. While running the label, Kristin and Jenny also wrote, recorded and released four highly-acclaimed Tsunami records on Simple Machines, and toured the US, Canada, England and Europe extensively.

After Simple Machines stopped putting out new records in 1998, Kristin permanently relocated to Philadelphia, PA where she lives with her husband, a concert promoter, and plays guitar in the lady-powered band, Ken. In 2001, Kristin graduated with a Masters in Urban Affairs and Public Policy from the University of Delaware. During her graduate program she was a recipient of a School of Urban Affairs and Public Policy Fellowship, and the Urban Affairs Association Award that recognized her thesis, The Internet as an Agent of Change, as a valuable contribution to the body of usable social knowledge. Since 2006, Kristin has also served on the Board of Governors of the Philadelphia Chapter of the Recording Academy. [rev 1/2008]

Nicole Vandenberg Director Emeritus, Board of Directors
Nicole Vandenberg is an organizer, activist and communications specialist. She is the director of Vandenberg Communications, a Seattle-based public relations firm that specializes in generating awareness, interest and support for artists and entertainers, issues and ideas, campaigns and companies. Among her firm's past and current clients are: Pearl Jam, Gloria Steinem, Choice USA, the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization's Groundwork 2001 concert series, People for the American Way, Voters for Choice, and the Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young 2000 tour.

Brian Zisk Technologies Director, Founding Board Member, and Vice-President of the Board of Directors [email]
is a serial entrepreneur and technology industry consultant specializing in digital media, web broadcasting and distribution technologies. Brian is a Co-Founder and Technologies Director of the Future of Music Coalition. Additionally, he is a Board Member and/or Strategic Advisor for a wide variety of tech companies and non-profits, including the Metabrainz Foundation creators of MusicBrainz, the Xiph Foundation creators of Open Source Audio and Video technologies including Icecast, Vorbis, FLAC, and Theora, The Online Gaming Group, LLC, creators of Chesspark.com, Clickfacts, Inc., Rightround/Bandbot, Kiptronic, Inc., Gotuit Media, and more. He was previously a founder of The Green Witch Internet Radio which was sold to CMGI at the turn of the millennium. He is active in many influential computer-mediated forums, is quoted and published extensively in the media, frequently appears on panels and at industry events domestically and abroad, and is an expert at frenzy whipping, brand awareness, and in creating new business models. He is married to entertainment attorney and piano player Shoshana Zisk and in their spare time they operate Kiddie Village, an award-winning children's video company. [rev 03/2007]

home | manifesto | resources | press & news | events | FAQs | subscribe | contact us