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| David Scull for The New York Times |
| At the 9:30 Club, from left, Billy Bragg, Steve Earle, Lester Chambers and the F.C.C.'s Jonathan S. Adelstein. |
WASHINGTON, Dec. 17 — Musicians rocked for peace in the 1960's. They rocked for Africa in the 1980's. Now they're rocking for stricter corporate media regulation.
And all they are saying is, Give radio station ownership caps a chance.
In front of an audience of 1,100 on a recent rainy Monday night at the cavernous 930 Club here, Tom Morello, former guitarist of Rage Against the Machine, took the stage with musicians like Billy Bragg, Steve Earle, Lester Chambers and Boots Riley. Here the raging was mainly against the star of media consolidation,
"What's happening is that Clear Channel is a great hulking Frankenstein monster gobbling things up," Mr. Bragg told the crowd, a mix of young and not-so-young, many of them urban professionals, briefcases and children in hand.
But the real favorites of the night were two balding, middle-aged Federal Communications Commission members, who joined the musicians and the M.C., Janeane Garofalo, for the last performance of a three-week, 13-city tour called Tell Us the Truth, aimed at educating the nation on the perils of media consolidation.
"This is about radio, TV and who owns your newspaper," said one commissioner, Michael J. Copps. Though his stage presence and monotone were perhaps more suited to testimony before a Congressional committee, the crowd responded with cheers. "We have to make sure the media represents everybody," he said.
The audience excitement grew when a fellow commissioner, Jonathan S. Adelstein, wearing a pink button-down shirt and glasses, grabbed a harmonica and joined the guitarists in a jam session.
The two commissioners had vehemently dissented when the F.C.C. voted 3-to-2 in June to loosen media ownership caps.
The Washington-commissioner-as-folk-hero is the peculiar byproduct of the battle of media deregulation, a once obscure policy issue that has become a topic of debate on college campuses.
Some musicians, including the Dixie Chicks and R.E.M.'s Michael Stipe, have been outspoken on the issue. They argue that consolidation of recording labels and radio stations has homogenized music across the country and stifled free expression. Musicians say that it is becoming more difficult for new artists to break into the mainstream and that the quality of music is suffering.
Musicians have been increasingly active in complicated debates over media ownership, labor and copyright law since 1998, when many realized that their own interests were not necessarily aligned with those of the recording industry.
The Recording Industry Association of America had convinced Congress to tuck a small clause into copyright law that would give recording labels the rights to songs in perpetuity instead of having them revert back to the artists. That galvanized musicians, prompting them to form a lobbying group, the Recording Artists' Coalition.
"If you want to differentiate with pre-1998, it's that the artists realized that collectively they needed more," said Jay Rosenthal, a lawyer for the coalition. "They realized that they needed something on a political structure level, rather than as a fight between the singular artist and their label."
The musicians got the clause repealed in a year, a surprisingly short time in a city that often measures legislation over multiple two-year Congressional sessions.
Since then musicians have become more politically sophisticated in the rituals of Washington. Musicians, including Don Henley and Sheryl Crow, have testified in front of Congress. Hundreds of musicians signed a letter to the F.C.C. urging that it not loosen the limits on radio conglomerates. The Future of Music Coalition, a nonprofit advocacy group, commissioned a widely cited report showing how media consolidation has hurt the diversity of radio programming across the country. This contradicted the conclusions drawn by a similar F.C.C. study.
Some musicians say they feel under attack for expressing their views, in music or in person. Mr. Morello said he became riled when he obtained a list of 150 restricted songs that a local radio station manager supposedly sent to Clear Channel stations after Sept. 11, 2001. "It's an overt act of censorship directly tied to media consolidation," Mr. Morello said. The list included Nena's anti-nuclear song "99 Luft Balloons" and John Lennon's "Imagine."
Clear Channel denies that it has any policy to restrict music. "There was no corporate-issued list," said Kim Hulse, a spokeswoman for Clear Channel. "That's not the way the company works." She said that Rage Against the Machine songs were played 800 times on the 1,200 or so Clear Channel stations in the two weeks after Sept. 11.
During the war in Iraq,
"What happened to my clients is perhaps the most compelling evidence that radio ownership consolidation has a direct negative impact on diversity of programming and political discourse over the public airwaves," Simon Renshaw, the Dixie Chicks' manager, said at a Senate committee hearing in July. At the same hearing, Cumulus's chief executive, Lewis Dickey, said the company's stations had merely been responding to listener demand.
Mr. Riley, a rapper, said he could not get other musicians to speak out against the Iraqi invasion. "They were, like, `The radio will ban my songs,' and the truth is, we couldn't say, `You are wrong,' " he said.
Mr. Riley blames consolidation for what he describes as a dearth of political music. "Not only does it change the artists that get out there, but it changes the art that gets out there," he said.
Only a handful of artists are active on music policy issues. Still, members of Congress and commissioners say the influence of musicians can be felt, even against the backdrop of corporate lobbying. When the F.C.C. loosened regulations on ownership of newspapers and television stations in June, for example, it left the rules for radio largely in place. Mr. Adelstein of the F.C.C. said that the Future of Music study and other artists' efforts were partly responsible. In an interview after the concert, Mr. Adelstein said, "The F.C.C. study that was otherwise being used was basically blown out of the water."
