PRESS RELEASE

Future of Music Coalition's Jenny Toomey Appointed
Program Officer for Ford Foundation

Kristin Thomson to Serve as FMC’s Interim Executive Director
Michael Bracy to Chair FMC Board of Directors

Washington, DC – Future of Music Coalition (FMC) is pleased to announce that Executive Director and Founder Jenny Toomey has been named the next Program Officer for Media and Cultural Policy at the Ford Foundation.  Jenny Toomey will leave FMC as Executive Director effective January 14, 2008 but will actively participate in the transition of new leadership to the organization.

"I am proud of the work that Future of Music Coalition has done," said Jenny Toomey,  "from examining the exciting changes at the intersection of music and technology, to sounding the alarm on the dangers of radio consolidation.  FMC has had amazing breadth and depth in its work, and I feel very lucky to have played a part in it.  I will miss working with such creative and dedicated colleagues, but look forward bringing my experiences in the field to media and cultural policy at Ford."

FMC is currently engaged in a search process and expects to make an announcement regarding its new Executive Director early in 2008.  In the interim, FMC’s Deputy and Education Director Kristin Thomson will serve as Executive Director, a role she played in 2004 while Jenny took a temporary leave of absence from the organization.  Upon the appointment of a new Executive Director, Kristin will resume her Program Director role.

"Jenny has been a true leader and an inspiration to all of us," said FMC Deputy Director, Kristin Thomson, who has been working with Jenny Toomey since 1989, first as youth activists in the DC punk scene, then as band mates in Tsunami, and as business partners in their indie record label, Simple Machines. "She was the driving force behind FMC, tenacious in her belief that positive change can only happen if stakeholders recognize the legitimacy of each other’s positions and strive to recognize the middle ground.  I will miss her intellect, her wit, and her creativity in her role as FMC’s leader, but we all knew that her talents were meant to push for social change on a much broader level.  Her new role at the Ford Foundation is a perfect fit.  I wish her the best of luck."

To support this transition, FMC co-founder and Board Member Michael Bracy will become President of the Board of Directors.

About the Future of Music Coalition

Future of Music Coalition was founded in June 2000 by Michael Bracy, Walter McDonough, Jenny Toomey and Brian Zisk, on the belief that artists and citizens must actively participate in the design of technologies and legal structures that determine how they will receive news, information and entertainment in the future.  FMC has served as a bridge between the traditionally isolated communities of artists, technologists, academics, lawyers, entrepreneurs and policymakers. By engaging these communities simultaneously it has consistently identified legitimate middle ground positions that have inspired unprecedented collaboration and forward motion in a terminally entrenched environment of litigation and incumbent control. 

FMC has testified before the Congress, the FCC and the US Copyright Office, published original research, convened national policy conferences, educated musicians, citizens who care about music, policymakers and opinion leaders around these policy issues, developed a network of thousands of stakeholders, been cited in thousands of articles, worked in coalition with dozens of other organizations and shaped critical debates which impact creators and citizens.

Some key highlights of the organization’s work:

• Hosted seven Policy Summits and three Policy Days since 2000, each bringing hundreds of musicians, policymakers, advocates, attorneys, and technologists together for engaging discussions about emerging music/technology issues.  Widely praised by advocates and industry alike, the Policy Summit has built a reputation as "a kind of Geneva where all sides in any number of contentious music industry fights can get together and play nice for a few days. Even more importantly, it offers pinstriped Washingtonians a rare opportunity to hear musicians articulate their concerns in person instead of relying on competing lobbying groups that claim to espouse their interests." (Washington Post, May 6, 2004).

• Conducted statistically sound research on the effects of the 1996 Telecommunications Act on radio deregulation, health insurance levels among musicians, and a content analysis of citizen comments in the FCC’s docket on media ownership.  In 2004, FMC assisted the Pew Internet & American Life Project with a comprehensive online survey of musicians regarding the internet, copyright and peer to peer file-sharing.

• Publicly critiqued policy developments that would harm musicians. FMC has filed testimony in Congress and at the US Copyright Office, Federal Trade Commission and the Federal Communications Commission on issues such as the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, webcasting rates and reporting requirements, the seven year rule on musicians’ contracts, major label accounting practices, media ownership, local broadcasting markets, payola, low power FM, the transition to digital audio broadcasting, and the public performance right for sound recordings.

• Exposed the structural problems in the music industry.  In 2001, FMC published a critique of traditional record contract language.  FMC asked dozens of practicing music attorneys to identify which major label contract clauses and standard industry deductions considered to be the most onerous. Then FMC paired the actual contract language with plain English explanations in an attempt to outline the implications that result from signing a standard major label deal.
  
• Addressed the problem of health insurance for musicians through a free advice line.  In 2005, FMC launched the Health Insurance Navigation Tool (HINT), a free service that musicians can call to get health insurance advice from insurance experts, who are also musicians. Callers get a full half-hour to go over their medical needs with our HINT team and discuss what insurance plans might be appropriate for them.

• Conducted dozens of interviews with musicians, producers, academics and lawyers to create the definitive study on sample license clearance and its effect on collage art, which interviews more than 120 major artists including members of Public Enemy, De La Soul and Girl Talk. 

FMC’s research projects, educational events and advocacy work have generated volumes of press including articles in the New York Times, Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, Billboard, CNET, Wired, The Nation, and Salon.

More About Jenny Toomey

Jenny Toomey is an intellectual, an activist and a musician. After graduating from Georgetown University with an interdisciplinary major in Philosophy, English and Women's Studies in 1990, Jenny co-ran Simple Machines, an independent record label for eight years with FMC’s Kristin Thomson. Simple Machines had over 70 releases, the most important of which may have been a 24 page Mechanic's Guide to Putting Out Records, Cassettes and CDs which clearly and practically described the process of putting out records and CDs, while educating young artists about the value of retaining control of their work. This guide helped to launch a countless number of independent labels and led to somewhat of a DIY renaissance in the alternative music community throughout the 1990s.

In the past 15 years Jenny has also been a composer and performer on at least 12 CDs and dozens of compilation records, singles, and even a musical. These records were released on Simple Machines and other respected independent labels including Homestead, Sub Pop and 4AD. Her second solo CD, Tempting, was released October 2002 on Misra Records.

After closing down Simple Machines in 1998, Jenny worked for three years at the Washington Post as a copywriter. She also wrote music and technology reviews for the Post, Village Voice, CNET and a variety of other music and technology publications. Here is where she began to understand the potential power of technology to transform the lives of musicians. This fascination with technology, when combined with her work organizing musicians to support the FCC's Low Power Radio initiative, led her to join with Kristin Thomson and Insound.com to create an online forum called The Machine in December 1999. At this site, Kristin and Jenny began the process of educating themselves and other musicians about the music/technology landscape. They also began to raise critical questions regarding the artist's role in the unfolding technological revolution. After publishing an op-ed piece in the Washington Post, Jenny pulled together a board that wrote and published the Future of Music Manifesto, thus leading to the formation of the organization in June 2000.

In the past seven years, Jenny has spoken about music and technology at Harvard, MIT, Columbia's American Assembly, South By Southwest, CMJ, Comdex, University of Chicago, Temple University, NARM Convention, CNN International, Tech TV, London's Net Media, Manchester's In The City conference and on NPR. In March 2001 she was named one of Internet Weekly's "25 Unsung Heroes of the Web" and more recently received a special achievement award from the Washington Area Music Association for her activism.

More About the Ford Foundation

The Ford Foundation is an independent, nonprofit grant-making organization. For more than half a century it has been a resource for innovative people and institutions worldwide, guided by its goals of strengthening democratic values, reducing poverty and injustice, promoting international cooperation and advancing human achievement. With headquarters in New York, the foundation has offices in Africa, the Middle East, Asia, Latin America, and Russia. 

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