What does broadband policy mean for musicians?

The Future of Music Coalition held its annual Policy Day in Washington (DC) bringing together the wonks who are regular fixtures in DC tech policy circles with the artists and entrepreneurs who are actually producing all this "innovation" that good tech policy is supposed to promote. Genuinely open and collaborative many-to-many networks and collaborative folk cultural production processes all run contrary to the interests of people in the bread-and-circuses business... the ones who, as Hank Shocklee (Public Enemy, Shocklee Entertainment) put it, are hoping to "sell you a pill to make you feel like yourself." It sounds a bit conspiratorial when put that bluntly, but it amounts to little more than the simple market observation that truly broad, participatory creativity constitutes competition: If it's a threat to the business model when people pirate songs instead of buying them, it's no less a threat when they get together to make their own music instead of consuming someone else's. That's not to say telecoms or content industries are engaged in a conscious campaign to stamp out creativity, like the villains in some Grant Morrison comic. But there's a case to be made that it's the upshot of their efforts.