 My name is Jean Cook. I'm the director of programs for Future Music Coalition. It's my pleasure to introduce this next panel. So this is openness versus enforcement, one of the hottest topics in technology policy right now is the online freedom of expression. It's clear that the ability to speak, engage, and organize is something that the internet has amplified globally. On the other hand, there is the need to consider the rights of creators whose work fall under copyright law. Musicians and other creators depend on both free expression and the protection of that expression. Recent attempts to solve problems like commercial foreign websites that traffic an unauthorized American intellectual property were soundly defeated by a massive internet outcry that included artists and other copyright holders. One reason was that the Stop Online Piracy Act was deemed dangerous to expression. But is that the whole story? How do artists view these potentially competing concerns? Does the US government have a responsibility to fix things? And if so, what does that look like? We're happy to have with us today a panel that represents a range of viewpoints, all of them valid and informed. Please join us in welcoming musician and producer Aaron McCown, David Sohn, who's the general counsel of the Center for Democracy and Technology. John Strom will be joining us virtually. He's a senior counsel for Loeb and Loeb, LLP. He's going to be the virtual panelist from Nashville. And Maggie Vale is the co-executive director of Cache Music. Our moderator is Michael Bracey. Thank you, Jean. And thank you, everybody, for coming. And John, are you there virtually? I am. Can you hear me? It is so. John? Michael, I have to say I'm so bummed because I spent all this money in here and makeup. OK, so everybody watching in the web can see you and everybody in the room can hear you. That's good, that's good. Before we start, I want to clarify one point from the last conversation just to make sure everybody knows. We have a whole panel coming up later today featuring Kurt Hansen and David Lowry and other representatives who are going to do nothing but wonk out for about 45 minutes about the specifics of the webcasting bill. So for those of you on Twitter who want more of that, it's coming. For those of you who want less of that, that's when you get lunch. But we can figure that out as we get into the day. So I am so happy to have you guys here. Thank you, panelists, for taking time and traveling in. I know everybody's incredibly busy. I think when we thought about how to architect this day and thought about the schedule, we thought this would be a really nice place to start in terms of trying to get some perspective on kind of the big questions and some of the big approaches. One of the things we've talked about in Future Music Forever is the core concept that policy gets made by those who show up. That the only way you're going to have an impact in Washington, have an impact with the policy community is by engaging with it. And from the standpoint of the artist community and music community more broadly, the only way to fail is to just not try. And I think that one of the things that we saw last year with all the kind of emotion and energy around first the PIPA debate and then morphed into the SOPA PIPA debate was a lot of really complicated feelings and emotions because I think when policy gets involved, I appreciate what Greg Kotz said earlier that any time policymakers start thinking about music, that's a red flag for him. That's not the way it is for Future Music Coalition. We actually like to see policymakers engage on an ongoing basis around issues that impact arts and culture. But I think the starting point is always, what is the problem you're trying to solve? And I think that certainly from our standpoint, the very narrow questions about what do you do with overseas infringement with companies that are essentially running fraudulent operations overseas that are setting up basically storefronts that feel like iTunes, look like iTunes, feel like you're, you know, when my daughters put in their credit cards to download the record, they think they're doing something completely above board. And our government not feeling like we have anything in terms of legal authority to deal with that, that's a legitimate question. And it's an important question. I think the issue is, as that debate kind of morphed and other questions started to be asked, and real important issues surrounding the mechanics of legislation and what does legislation do and does the legislation actually match with what the goals are? You know, these are really important things and really important issues. And what we also recognize and value is the fact that we've been doing this for a long time. This is our 11th summit. We've been around for 12 years as an organization. And we think broadly about the role that technology is playing, not only in terms of the industry and kind of the commercial aspects, but in terms of art and culture and speech and politics and all the different things that is happening particularly overseas. And we're going to talk about Pussy Riot later today in terms of why Pussy Riot matters. But the role that technology is playing in terms of creating entirely new ways of thinking about art, thinking about culture, thinking about expression. And it's exciting. At the same time, again, this community is hurting and artists are hurting and it's a tough, tough time. So what we want to do in this conversation is really ask these guys to do some big thinking and take a look from 10,000 feet at where they are in terms of their perspective as artists, as innovators, that people have been a big part of the industry for a long time. David, in terms of somebody who's been deeply involved in policy conversations for a long time and now working kind of on the public interest side of things. And start with this basic question is what is that balance mean to you? Can we strike that balance? Is that balance being struck? Where are we? Where do we need to go? And they're going to solve all this in about 25 minutes and then we'll move on. So we're going to start and actually I'm going to make Erin go first because this is her fourth summit. And Erin, we're thrilled to say, is now on the future music board and has been able to think about these issues from a lot of different perspectives. So I'm going to first ask Erin, where are we? Where are we going? How are you feeling? What we got to do? Thank you so much, Michael, for asking me to begin. Hi, everybody. I'm Erin McKeown. I am a musician, writer and producer, as Michael said. Now on the FMC board and I'm happy to be here this morning talking about this. Just to start out with where we're at, I'm a musician who has, my first record came out in 1999 and I was on several mini majors and now I'm all the way at the point of running my own label and also self-managed and managing a team of 10 people who are getting ready to put out my next record. So I've sort of run the gamut in the last 12 something years of being a musician in this space. Where we're at right now is for me, honestly, this is the most exciting point that I've ever been at in my career with the potential to do a lot more things and to have a lot more choices. I think the most important thing for me right now is that technology is offering me this way to play a number of roles that weren't available to me before. As a sound recording owner, having more control over my songwriting copyright, having more control over my relationship with my fans. Those are all things that are really important to me that were not available to me many years ago. And so I find that really exciting that those things are basically available to me right now. I also get to participate more in these type of discussions than I was able to before. And it's very important to me to be organizing more artists and I am organizing more artists with the help of a lot of other people. We're starting to have more conversations about this and be more involved in this, which as Michael said is very, very, very important as we move forward. And other than that, just to throw out where I want to start with is that I have an opportunity, my rights are laid out for me. And what I really want is to have the choice of what to do with those rights. And that's, there's many different solutions to that. But for me as an artist, that's the bottom line is I want to have the opportunity to deploy, use, give up, enforce my rights however I choose. So I'll start there. That's awesome. I'm gonna turn to Nashville and John, I'm gonna ask you kind of the same question. Where are we? Where do we need to be going? How are we striking that balance? How do we need to strike that balance from your perspective? Thanks, Michael. Well, really, I think that's a good segue from Aaron because I'm a music business attorney. I represent almost exclusively artists in the music work I do. And I'm also a former professional musician. I can, me and Tim both, right? So, I, you know, it is an incredibly exciting time and the time that I was active, you know, working as a musician professionally, I still play music, but when I was doing it for a living, it was back in the 90s and much of what pushed me in this direction of getting involved and on the legal side and, you know, working for artists and in policy was frustration with the way the industry was done. And I do think we're in an incredibly exciting time right now. And I think there are, you know, many, many issues to work out, but we're finally starting to see this digital ecosystem develop. And I started practicing along in 2004. And that was sort of the moment when everyone was panicking about, you know, are we in a situation where, you know, recorded music is no longer gonna be economically viable on any level and that was a real possibility, it seemed like. And now we're starting to see that, you know, that's probably not gonna happen. You know, there's, you know, digital streaming is starting to really develop and is bringing with it many, many issues. And, you know, I got together last spring and South by Southwest with some of my favorite people in the industry, some of the, you know, thinkers I most respect like, Curtis Downs and Ed Pearson. And, you know, we wanted to understand, you know, the revenue model that was developing, especially with respect to Spotify. And so we spent some time really digging into some of the statements from, you know, some of the bigger artists that we work with. And it was generally pretty encouraging. You know, we saw that with the sort of scale that's starting to develop in the digital space, that, you know, that some of these artists are starting to make a significant amount of money. And I have conversations with, you know, some of the, you know, younger artists that I work with, some of the real developing artists where they're, you know, sort of freaking out because, you know, this thing is there, is there really any money in this digital space? And the short answer is sure. But there are also many, many things to work out in terms of policy, you know, this, the Internet Radio Fairness Act is a, you know, is a really interesting debate around that, which I'm trying very hard personally to understand. And, you know, I think we're in a moment where in the artist community, and I consider myself part of the artist community both as an artist and as an advocate, we really started to need to ask the difficult questions about transparency and about the revenue model with the, I think, reasonable expectation that, you know, the model going forward is going to be heavily dominated by digital streaming. So that's really where my attention is focused right now on the policy side. And, you know, and that's why I think it's amazing that, you know, we have these conversations. And this is, by the way, the 10th year that I've been involved with future music. So I think my first one was 2002. And over the course of that, it's been an incredible evolution. And I also want to say that the things we're starting to see become reality now in terms of the digital ecosystem. We were talking about that, you know, this was all something that, you know, people who were involved in FMC, Dan, and now we're definitely discussing as sort of, you know, extract possibilities. So it's thrilling to see it all come together, but it's also, you know, I think presents a real challenge. Yeah. Maggie, I'm going to turn to you and maybe talk a little bit about what you're doing at Cache. And we're going to have a presentation later today from Cache, so we don't need to get in the weeds on that. No. But just give a... I'll let Jesse do that. Yeah, Jesse can get in the weeds. You know, just reference that in terms of what you're developing and how you got to that point and kind of how you see this balance evolving. Okay. I am one of the co-executive directors of Cache Music. We are a nonprofit that is building a platform of open source tools for artists to use for free. We don't take a percentage. It's going to be the sort of the most baseline music technology, downloads, streaming, all sorts of things like that. We are also working on an educational component of Cache Music and we are building up a membership of artists right now. We have about 250 or so and we will tackle all sorts of issues like licensing, like publishing, helping artists understand a little better how to make the most out of these small streams of income coming from all directions. But I have been in the music industry for over 18 years now or something. I started when I was 19 at Kill Rock Stars. The independent record label from Olympia, Washington. I left there last summer and started working on Cache full-time. I've also been a musician for about 20 years. Never full-time but it is something that's really important to me. My whole view of how or where we stand right now, it is a really interesting time. It is really exciting. I love that there are more avenues for artists self-release. I love that there are more avenues for artists to take control of their lives. But I do have a real problem with this idea that the future is streaming because it doesn't work for everybody. Art doesn't always scale and what happens to those people. How are we gonna help the shushus of the world who are very important musicians who are never gonna scale massively on Spotify or Pandora or whatever. I think that thinking about art can be really, art in commerce is a strange intersection but I think it's important for us to remember the art aspect. Thanks and David, I'm gonna pull you in. On the policy side, I think one of the questions here and obviously the complexity and kind of what's at the heart of future music is that we are dealing with this incredibly complicated set of circumstances where you're looking at evolving technology and innovation on one side, you're looking at evolving markets and kind of consumer behavior at the other, you're looking at how art and culture fits into all this and the big question in terms of our conversation today is then what does Washington do? Specifically around these kind of technology issues and some of the things that have been debated around IP enforcement and net neutrality and all the other kind of tech related conversations that are happening. So what are you worried about or what are you excited about? What do you see happening and can you fit this together in terms of what you hear in terms of the music side? Sure, so I'll, first I wanna apologize for the squeaky voice, I hope it's still audible. Excuse me. So I work for the Center for Democracy and Technology, CDT, we're a non-profit public interest group that focuses on law and technology issues and it really starts from the proposition that the internet is a fundamentally democratizing technology, it creates new opportunities for free expression, for economic growth, for collaboration for everyone, including certainly for artists. But in order to play that role, we think it needs to have the right kind of policy environment and that's what my organization works to promote, a policy environment that will be favorable to the growth of the internet and to innovation and to free expression online. So we work on a variety of issues but I think the couple that are most relevant to the music, to both artists and the music industry are copyright and net neutrality and those are a couple of the issues that I've focused on during my time at CDT. Starting out with net neutrality, I mean that's important because it really determines how open and friendly the internet is going to be to new services, new business models, new ways of distributing music and you simply can't have the internet democratize opportunity if a handful of small ISPs basically have a chokehold on everything because they get to decide which services are gonna succeed and which services aren't. So I think that's a big issue. It's one where in terms of where we stand today, it's kind of in a weird limbo situation right now. The Federal Communications Commission, after lots of debate, put out for the first time some fully binding rules, those rules took effect about a year ago but they're now being challenged in court so everything is kind of awaiting that court case. In Congress, that issue has unfortunately gotten sucked into the general dynamics of partisanship so I think for internet neutrality, the forecast is basically just ongoing gridlock and stalemate in Congress. So that's why the status of where things are today really rests on the court case and the agency rules. So second issue I work on that I think is relevant here is copyright and copyright enforcement and from a high level, the trick there is that the same technology that creates all of these democratizing opportunities, it also makes it possible for people to engage in large scale infringement but since it's the same technology that we're talking about, whatever strategies we decide on for enforcement, we need to be very careful that we don't end up targeting technology or technological solutions that are gonna essentially throw the baby out with the bathwater by undermining the technology's positive potential as well as its infringement potential and that's what was really at stake in the debate last year over PIPA and SOPA. The supporters of those bills, I heard them say in a number of debates, well there's no first amendment right to infringe so clearly there's no first amendment problem here and while there certainly isn't a first amendment right to infringe, I think it really misses the point of what was at stake in those bills. Those bills messed with the internet's technical architecture, they messed with the social networks and kind of online sharing platforms and the ability of innovators to build new ones and that's really why that was a big concern. I think where we are today on copyright after the defeat of those bills, again we're in kind of a funny place, those bills amounted to something of, I think a hard reset for copyright policy but I think the lesson coming out of them for policy makers is that they need to be much more sensitive to the risk of collateral damage from copyright enforcement policies. If they aren't, and I should say that's an issue for Congress but not only for Congress, from the law enforcement side too, you've seen cases like where the law enforcement authorities seized the domain names of music blogs and held them for over a year without even telling them why and then it took over a year for them to finally hand back the domain name and say, oops, sorry, you can have it back and when you see abuses like that it really fosters an impression that the law enforcement authorities in this area and the policy makers in this area are not sensitive to the collateral damage that they cause and I think that in turn creates a real risk of undermining respect for copyright generally which ought to be of huge concern to artists, to copyright enforcers and to everyone in this field so I think going forward we need to do a much better job of that. Thanks, David, and thanks. Something I want to flag which, again, we always had the sense of deja vu with these conferences because we've been doing it for so blankety blank long but the one point I want to stress again is competition policy and we've said this for 12 years. One of the core underlying infrastructure challenges is the fact that people are willing to pay, there's stuff that we all pay as consumers or those who have the economic means will pay for as consumers, we'll pay our $100 data plan, we'll pay our ISP fees, we'll get our iPhone 4, we'll get our Galaxy 3, we'll pay for this stuff and that creates tremendous economic pressure and the fact that these prices are so high is a policy issue. It's about duopolies, it's about the government and their kind of oversight of our basic telecom infrastructure and that's why FMC has fought that from the beginning not only in terms of neutrality and preserving innovation but in terms of AT&T to mobile merger in terms of a lot of the issues that we've worked on and one thing I would love to see and I hope that we can see moving forward is a kind of renewed engagement from the broader music community around these economic issues that if we have more access to, more ubiquitous access to better broadband at cheaper prices that has fundamental economic impact on consumers and consumers' opportunities to put more money not only to the music community but into other areas. So I'm at a loss because our schedule is way too packed today so we're gonna run a little bit late and frankly I wish we could just have you guys like three hours but as most of you know we've taken a three day conference we're compressing it down to a day. I'm gonna see if anybody has any questions, comments, feedback or Maggie or any of you guys when I jump in and just respond to what you heard. We're gonna go for about four or five more minutes if that's all right, Kevin, somebody? It's back here, the mic is back here. If anybody has questions, comments, reactions, panelists, if you have anything you wanna say? Strom, real quick, I would like to put you on the spot. Yes. If you don't mind. I have something I wanna say about Maggie's comments but go ahead. I thought you might. Why don't you respond to Maggie and I would be curious if you would be comfortable of talking with some specificity. I think a lot of the folks who are watching today may not be aware of some of the artists that you work with and I think there's some amazing kind of case studies as far as what's happened, particularly over the last 18 months or so in terms of how this stuff is all coming together. I'll keep this really quick. My own background, I used to play in the band The Lemonhead so I had a real sort of look at professional music back then and now my own clientele is mostly independent artists, some of whom are fairly successful. I work with Bonavere and the Civil Wars and Dawes and Alabama Shakes and Toro E. Mawes. So these are independent label artists who've achieved a measure of success and are sustaining real professional careers. And the one thing that most, if not all, my clients have a comment is that they're sort of art first, commerce second and a lot of our role as the business team is to figure out how to make this creative work which the integrity of the work is non-negotiable work in commerce and provide a livelihood. And what Maggie said about art, not scaling I think is really true. And I think for most of these artists that Maggie works with and that I work with, the art side of it is of paramount importance. The one thing that I'm interested in when I ran models based on likely growth of Spotify or similar services and certainly looking at my own catalog of tiny and significant releases I own and control and seeing the growth there, I think there's a real possibility that as the streaming ecosystem really starts to scale, we're gonna see a lot more revenue coming to the smaller artists and for the larger artists we're gonna be dealing with hundreds of millions or billions of performances. So I'm excited about that possibility but very nervous about how it's gonna shake out for artists and very focused on the many questions that raises. And this of course is something we've been working on at FMC for the last couple of years in terms of the artist revenue stream research project and really trying to get some real data and metrics around how the pie is starting to evolve and the 42 distinct revenue streams that ours are having now, Gene Cook will be presenting on that later today. Oh, we're gonna do a quick question and then thank you. So I'm gonna agree with the whole idea that art's got a countness and that streaming, everybody's kind of a little dubious about that. So the idea of this middle class, artist middle class at Westagrin raised as a possibility through streaming services. You don't think that's a reality and secondly, how can we get there if not? What besides streaming are the options for these art first artists? It'll be streaming alone. I think streaming probably will be an important piece of it for sure. But I think ultimately, my wish and my dream and maybe that's what it is, is that by enabling artists to direct connectedly with their fans, they can encourage sales. I mean, we're all willing to pay, are not we are, I'm not. But lots of people are willing to pay $5 for their cup of coffee. They're fancy cup of coffee every day. But they balk at paying $10 to an artist for their favorite record that they might listen to dozens or hundreds of times. That's just not even considered normal for a whole generation of kids. And I feel like part of that is the narrative that the music industry is terrible and that there's nothing fair about it. And so why even try? Part of it is just sort of a generational thing. But we all relearn things. We all learn to respect and appreciate things that maybe could be free. NPR works, public radio, if there was a direct connection that people felt to their favorite bands, maybe they'd be more willing to buy an album or even give them a tip. Just some sort of more significant piece of income versus 0.004 cents per stream or whatever. Can I comment on that real quick? Let Erin go first, John. Oh, go ahead, yes. Sorry, John, couldn't. No problem. I just want to jump in with Maggie and also to answer Greg's question. How to create this middle class, which has been raised before Tim Westergren raised it this morning. But this idea that multiple roles, I think, and multiple streams are gonna be really important. Like again, as I began saying, I'm a copyright owner, I'm a sound recording owner, I'm a touring artist, like multiple roles. And also this idea that Maggie's talking about, when I talk about this stuff, I like to talk about food. I like to talk about the success of the local food movement. And I like to talk about the way that in the last, pick a number of five years, 10 years, you can look at it. And we've seen a real change in who's participating in our food system, both in who's growing it and who's eating things and a conversation about food. And people are totally willing to pay, you use an example of coffee, but let's use the example of like a CSA. People are willing to pay for that because there's been a conversation about what benefits that and the part of the tiny ecosystem that that's part of. So I think that's part of the solution. And I'll just say this last thing, which is that I'm actually really tired of being told that things are gonna scale. I'm just tired of being told that. I haven't seen it. It doesn't feel like it. I think my retweet from the conference is art doesn't always scale. But again, I just wanna come back to talking about relationships, talking about conversations and talking about like small economies in between people that aren't necessarily about monetization, I think is the many-fold answer to this question. John, do you wanna say something? Hey, Greg Cot. I do indeed. Yeah, I think those are all fantastic points and completely valid that argument resonates with me. That argument resonates with me. I'm hearing a weird echo. Did we lose strong? A lot of... We need a better infrastructure. What's going on in hearing weird stuff? Okay. Am I still on? Yes, you are. Okay, cool. A lot of the challenges is bringing people who won't pay under any circumstances into the economy somehow. Moving them to some service where there's somehow revenue generating and at that point it's about competing with free. And I think if I could harken back for a moment to that widely sort of discussed Emily White article from earlier in the year, the point that she made at the end is she said, hey, look, our generation, we're not willing to pay for anything but we will pay something for total access to everything all the time. Which is disturbing on some level but there's also a lesson in there which is for the people who have no intention of ever paying for recorded music again, if there's a way to bring them into the economy somehow then that could be a win. And I think on the one extreme of the true fans who are willing to pay for product, willing to pay for the experience and the connection to their favorite artist. I think that's a fairly thin sliver of the entire market. And then there's a big piece of the market that you have no intention to pay ever again and part of the challenge is somehow bringing them into it. And I think you do that by successfully competing with free by offering alternatives that are superior to the free option. Thanks, John. I hate to say we are absolutely over time already. So I apologize for having to make this such a compressed conversation because I think you all have a lot more to add and hopefully this is just a beginning. And I know we're gonna pack a lot of these issues throughout the day and on an ongoing basis through our own collective dialogues. Thank you so much panelists. Thank you, John, for participating. And next we're gonna have Daniel Raymer.