Future of Music Newsletter #24

It’s amazing how much can happen in a month. We’ve been criss-crossing the country as of late – from Richmond to Seattle to Austin to Orlando to DC – participating in panels, organizing activists, giving testimony and playing rock shows, all in the shadow of the profundity of war. With the 24-hour news coverage of the war, which is simultaneously gripping and sickening, we are forced to think about how the media affects our lives – how it informs us as citizens and, even more, how it can actually influence the course of events through its very presence.

It is with this heightened awareness of the media’s impact that we redouble our efforts to organize and inform our supporters about the importance of the media ownership proceedings that are currently under consideration by the FCC. The FCC is expected to release its final order on numerous cross ownership rules in eight weeks – rules that will have a profound impact on the shape of media ownership for decades to come. We urge you to attend hearings if you can, submit comments to the FCC, and write letters to your members of Congress. For more about what you can do, read on.

Peace.

As mentioned in prior FMC newsletters, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) is currently considering the "necessity" of a broad set of media ownership rules that govern TV, newspapers and cable. There’s a great chart of what rules are under consideration here, thanks to the Project on Excellence in Journalism:
http://www.journalism.org/resources/research/reports/ownership/rulechart.asp

This week, the FCC announced that it expects to release its final order on whether to revise, retain or get rid of these rules on June 2. If all or some of these rules are thrown out, we can expect another wave of media consolidation similar to what happened with commercial radio following the 1996 Telecommunications Act. This means even fewer owners could control vast swaths of the media landscape, affecting the distribution of news, information, and music on a national scale.

The FCC and Congress need to hear from concerned citizens and musicians about the potential impact that the lifting of these rules might have on your livelihood, your access to news and information, and your community.

We urge you – as citizens and musicians — to attend any upcoming public hearings that you can and let policymakers hear your concerns. There are three more public hearings scheduled:

Upcoming FCC Media Ownership Hearings
–––––––––––––-
Monday, March 31
Duke University Law School, Durham, NC
12:30 PM – 5 PM
Room 3043 of Duke Law School
Live Webcast will be available at: http://www.law.duke.edu/webcast/

Help us spread the word! Download a flyer about this event here.

Here’s a cover story about the upcoming hearing in Durham:

Look who’s standing up to big media
Local media magnates will join activists at an FCC hearing to oppose deregulation
By Fiona Morgan
Durham Independent, March 26, 2003

Wednesday, April 2
Northwestern University in Chicago, IL
9:30 AM – 4 PM
Lincoln Hall, 357 E. Chicago Avenue
http://www.law.northwestern.edu/news/spring03/mediaownership.htm

Help us spread the word! Download a flyer about this event here:
http://www.futureofmusic.org/files/oldsite/images/FCChearingchicago.pdf

Monday, April 7
Arizona State University, Mesa, AZ
1 PM – 4:30 PM
Location: KAET Channel 8 television studio
http://www.benton.org/press/2003/pr0319.html

If you can’t attend but want to know what you can do to register your opinion, go here
Access a huge list of articles about media ownership and deregulation here

As reported in the last newsletter, the Future of Music Coalition participated in the media ownership hearing in Seattle. The event was incredibly inspiring— both the hearing and the rock/activist event held later that evening at the Experience Music Project.

During the hearing, FCC Commissioners Copps and Adelstein listened to over 5 hours of public testimony from citizens and industry. The public comments uniformly requested that the media cross ownership rules be kept in place. After a short break we were off to the concert/rally at EMP where Chuck D (Public Enemy) captivated the thousand music fans and activists packed into the Sky Church Hall, who listened respectfully to the speakers and cheered! Jenny Toomey was honored to share the stage with such notables as DJ Davy D, US Representatives Jim McDermott (D-Wa) and Jay Inslee (D-Wa), and Commissioner Adelstein himself. NARAS, EMP, Dave Meinert and Reclaim the Media did an amazing job pulling the whole thing together in less than two weeks. If we had ten artist hubs nationally like that group in Seattle, we could do some big things!

Here’s some press about the Seattle event:

Whose Media?
The Federal Communications Commission’s debate over ownership rules comes to Seattle.
by Philip Dawdy
Seattle Weekly, March 10, 2003

Media ownership needs to be watched, FCC panel says
As advertised, the subject sounded dense: "public hearing on media concentration."
But the hearing drew a boisterous crowd of several hundred people - some from as far away as California’s Bay Area - to a University of Washington auditorium on Friday. It was only the third public hearing the Federal Communications Commission has held on what one member has called its most important decision in years: whether several federal restrictions on media ownership should be lifted.
By Gene Johnson
The Associated Press, March 9, 2003

Move to ease media-ownership rules given a cool reception in Seattle
By Alwyn Scott
Seattle Times, March 8, 2003

Backing, hisses for media consolidation
[…]More than 250 people showed up for the Federal Communications Commission field hearing held on the University of Washington campus. Many people in the crowd were decidedly against media consolidation — some of them literally hissing whenever any large media conglomerate’s name was mentioned.
By Todd Bishop
Seattle Post-Intelligencer, March 8, 2003

Media Rules Unsexy But Important
In a series of hearings, the FCC hosts public comment on its proposal to loosen media consolidation rules. Despite sparse news coverage of the issue, the audience has plenty to say.
By Manny Frishberg
Wired, March 8, 2003

The FCC and the Octopus
The Federal Communications Commission is convening in Seattle tomorrow to hear testimony on whether to loosen or repeal its rules on media ownership. These rules now forbid one company to buy a city’s TV stations, radio stations and newspaper, or to merge two TV networks, or to reach more than 35 percent of all TV households in the nation. These rules should remain.
Op-Ed in Seattle Times, March 6, 2003

South by Southwest, which is held in Austin, TX each year, is always a great opportunity for FMC board members to mix business with pleasure. In the three days she was in Austin, Jenny Toomey played four shows, engaged with many coalition members and allies, and participated in an amazing panel about artists and activism with the likes of John Doe (X), John Sinclair (MC5), Mike Mills (REM), Patisktani poet/dissident Salman Ahmad, writer Neal Pollack and cultural icon/ice cream flavor Wavy Gravy. While Jenny’s panel was packed to the gills, just a few doors away the “most important panel of the conference” was occurring, that being a debate hosted by Sandy Pearlman (Blue Oyster Cult, and so much more…) on the idea of taxing “piracy-enabling” mechanisms and distributing the collected monies to artists.

There is no way that we can properly summarize the Sandy’s theory in this newsletter, but here it is in a nutshell: when consumers purchase a computer, CD burner or other “piracy-enabling” mechanisms, a small tax would be added to the price. The monies collected from this tax would then be distributed to artists and musicians who have – as a group – been negatively impacted by systems like KaZaa where music is downloaded without compensation for the artists. Under Sandy’s model, however, systems like KaZaa can carry on – and other free systems can flourish as well – because the burden of compensation for artists would shift to the other end of the transaction, when consumers buy the computers that make it possible to download the songs.

Suffice to say that Sandy’s idea touched off a rigorous and enlightening debate among the other panelists – William Terry Fisher from Harvard, manager and big thinker Peter Jenner, FMC’s Director of Economic Analysis Peter DiCola, and The Nation’s John Nichols – and the handful of audience members. In fact, the discussion stretched on for nearly 2 and a half hours. As noted, we are not giving his theory the full treatment it deserves in this newsletter nor are we highlighting the many logistical problems that it suggests (who gets paid, and how?), but luckily Sandy intends to set up similar panels/debates at other places around the country this year to further articulate his idea. We’ll let you know his plans.

On Saturday, Kristin Thomson joined FCC Commissioner Jonathan Adelstein, US Rep. Lloyd Doggett (D-TX), John Nichols, NPR’s Rick Karr, and Screaming Trees’ drummer Barrett Martin for a panel on the impact of media consolidation on musicians and citizens.

Jenny Toomey
Jenny Toomey attended the FCC hearings in Richmond and Seattle including the incredibly powerful post-hearing event with Chuck D, Congressman Jim McDermott, Davy D. NARAS and Reclaim the Media at The Experience Music Project. She then hopped a plane down to SXSW in Austin and shared an incredible panel with respected musician/activists: John Sinclair (MC5), John Doe (X), Mike Mills (REM) as well as journalists Greg Kot and Neal Pollack & activist/clown Wavy Gravy. The 400 people who attended that event displayed a profound understanding of the impact that the upcoming FCC ruling would have on access to the media. Less than a week away from war they were particularly concerned about war coverage.

After playing four shows in two days she abandoned Texas for the NARM conference in Orlando to sit on a radio panel with none other than the inventor of independent radio promotion, Jeff McClusky. This was a "Bizarro-World" event where experts argued whether radio "sucked" or not and Jeff used the term "ethical" to describe his business. Turning the craziness up a notch…not one panelist mentioned widely-reported allegations that every song on commercial radio is bought and sold. Jenny learned why the panel steered clear of payola talk when she was roundly booed for raising it as a topic.

In the past week she has been digging in to her new role as organizer for Robert McChensey’s new organization, Free Press. As outreach coordinator for FP, Jenny will be organizing what she hopes will be one of the most galvanizing Media Justice conferences in the history of the movement. Mark your calendars for November 7-9 and watch for upcoming details.

Peter DiCola
Peter DiCola is working on a study of entry, exit, and mergers in radio. (That’s this week’s working title anyway.) As a part of this, he is looking into the issue of ‘cheating’ by radio firms with respect to compliance with the 1996 Telecom Act, e.g. the ways radio firms have used weirdness in certain FCC regulations to subvert the legislative intentions of an already-generous policy change.

Kristin Thomson
Kristin Thomson has been as busy as ever. In mid-March the Thomson-Dilworth family head down to Austin for SXSW, starting the week off in true rock star style – eating many peanut butter sandwiches and drinking low-grade coffee while sitting on the naugahide bench seats of the Burning Brides’ tour bus. Baby Riley – though only 6 months old – seems to dig the traveling life, spending a couple of days charming the catering crews in the backstage world of the Audioslave/Burning Brides tour and then a few more days being pushed around Austin, TX attending panels and various meetings. After SXSW, Kristin got her guitar fingers in action for Ladyfest Philly, where both of the bands she plays in – Ken and Tsunami – pitched in for the benefit. Yay ladies!

Michael Bracy
Michael took a very brief break from the battle over the diversity of voices in the media as the diversity of voices in the Bracy household increased by a third with the March 19 arrival of Owen Timothy. Thankfully, everyone is doing great. In “real” news, the focus is remaining on the FCC media ownership review and congressional oversight of the rulemaking process. We are also working closely with our colleagues in the music community to raise concerns about the implications of consolidation in the radio and concert industries, particularly as they relate to Clear Channel.

Walter McDonough
Walter McDonough has been interviewing specialists in the field of international royalty collection as well as various members of the WIPO. He will be speaking at the MEIEA Convention in New Orleans during Final Four Weekend.

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