jason (FMA Admin)

The Future of Music Coalition held their 10th annual Policy Summit in Washington DC earlier this week. It was my third year attending and it really was "Another Spectacular Summit". With an eye on Capital Hill, FMC unites forward-thinking artists, techies, industry innovators, lawyers, policymakers, media makers, music fans, and others with a stake in the future of music. Discussions range from "Creative Capital: Musicians, Money, and the Tools That Bring Them Together" to intricate examinations of current legal cases like "The Brewing Battle over Copyright Termination and Transfer".

Some of my most interesting conversations took place outside of the sessions themselves, where one moment I was talking White Spaces with Harold Feld from Public Knowledge, the next I was eating vegan food with Jill Sobule brainstorming producers for her next album and asking why she prefers freeform radio (she shouted out WFMU and dublab during her panel!) to the overwhelmingness of the blogosphere. Finally I wound up graciously accepting a ride to Union Station in Bob Boilen's hybrid, where we talked about his various musical projects outside of All Songs Considered, and the differences between approaching music as a hobby and music as a career.

Tom Silverman recently blamed amateur artists for "clutter[ing] the musical environment with crap so that the artists who really are pretty good have more trouble getting through than they ever did before". This was in a controversial Wired Magazine interview by Eliot Van Buskirk, where the Tommy Boy founder also advocates for the importance of record labels as cultural filters and sort of musical investors. To that end, Silverman proposes a new system where labels go in 50/50 with each artist on an LLC. So I was hoping to catch Silverman -- along with Ian Rogers of Topspin, Google's Senior Copyright Counsel Fred von Lohmann, Public Enemy's Chuck D and more -- as part of Monday's totally stacked opening session. But it turned out to be a long way to DC from Pop Montreal, and I didn't account for rush hour or the fact that Georgetown lacks a Metro stop, so I'll have to catch this one in the forthcoming FMC archives.

Silverman's (maybe not so controvercial) perspective that "80 percent of all records released are just noise" was echoed more forcefully by T-Bone Burnett, who declared that "The future of music is analog" because "everything on the Internet is amateur". What was billed as a "conversation with Greg Kot" became more of an echo chamber. The Chicago Tribune music critic set aside his own "Sound Opinions" (the likes of which can be found in his latest book, Ripped: How the Wired Generation Revolutionized Music) to let the 4-decade industry veteran T-Bone Burnette speak about how the digital era has "devalued music" and how "we as a society are exporting all of our knowledge and Intellectual Property to The East."

"Of course mp3s should be free," the legendary musician, songwriter, and golden-eared record producer expounded as the audience twittered away, "They aren't worth anything anyway." T-Bone believes this because -- according to his seasoned ears -- "a transistor radio from the 50's sounds better than an iPod today". Tragically, most contemporary listeners would disagree; an ongoing study by Stanford professor Jonathan Berger finds that each year, more of his students prefer the sound of 128kbps mp3s. Maybe it's a new expression of the same sort of nostalgia that T-Bone Burnett feels toward the transistor radio. And maybe it helps explain some of the sounds in the FMA's chiptune or lo-fi libraries, which sounds great to me and I know I'm not the only one.

T-Bone's wisdom was aimed at professional musicians -- literally pitting them against the so-called hobbyists. And it was very Prince-like: "Stay completely away from the Internet. If you're a serious musician, avoid myspace. On myspace, you're one in a million". My first thought was of course to check out T-Bone's official myspace. But despite the hypocracy, there are kernals of truth to these bold statements. Simply putting up a myspace is not going to do anything for an artist -- the question is how do people come across their site. The context in which we hear music is part of the listening experience and affects how we value music both socially and economically. But I think this has more to do with social context than the physical or virtual format.

These warnings against digital utopianism would've been a bit more refreshing if anybody at FMC had been its proponent. But unless I missed something during the first day (which I'm told included a lot of talk about Twitter...), nobody was making any sort of claims that the interweb could magically solve all of our problems. The folks at FMC are too smart for that, and for they've been working through the nitty-gritty details of the digital era for 10 years going strong.

There's so much more to recap -- like how Jesse Von Doom and Cash Music stole the show alongside YouTube, Facebook and Neilson... stay tuned