BY DANIEL MCSWAIN
Lawmakers, lobbyists, musicians and recording industry executives will be among those to address a variety of hot-button issues at next week's Future of Music Policy Summit in Washington D.C.

Several panels focus on issues such as performance royalties and their impact on webcasting and other broadcast media, the legislative and policy-making processes affecting music media, and the role of ubiquitous Wi-Fi in the future of the music industry.

Scheduled panels over the two-day summit include, "The Hill was Alive with the Sound of Music: a policymaker roundtable", featuring top congressional and FCC staffers for a discussion about the impact of policy decisions confronting the music industry, and "Music License One Stop Shopping: impossible dream or emerging reality?" which will feature DiMA Executive Director Jonathon Potter and MCPS-PRS Public Affairs Director Sarah Faulder.

Senator Ron Wyden (D-OR), one of the original sponsors of the Internet Radio Equality Act in the Senate (S. 1353) will be on hand to deliver a keynote address on Tuesday. Also scheduled to speak are SoundExchange Executive Director John Simson, Reigster of the U.S. Copyright Office Marybeth Peters, and Pandora founder Tim Westergren, among others.

RAIN will be reporting on-location from Washington D.C. next week. We'll be publishing reports from the panels over the coming days.

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From Digital Music News: "Streaming radio innovator Mercora is now giving its model a facelift, and rebranding itself in the process. 

"The company, best known for offering a streaming peer-to-peer concept, is now unwrapping a music-focused social networking play. 

"The company is changing its name to Social.FM...  Instead of a simple list of radio stations from at-home deejays, the spruced-up version layers friends, comments, and a more visual interface...

"The refresh immediately elicits comparisons to Last.fm... Mercora has always crafted radio stations from personal digital music collections, a seemingly innocent, non-interactive play.  But labels have raised some concern about functionality that enables users to start a particular station with a specific song...

"As a result, users can easily simulate an on-demand streaming experience, though Sampath pointed to a conciliatory relationship with labels.  'If the labels do come back and say this is interactive, we would agree to give them higher royalties,' Sampath noted."

Read the entire article at Digital Music News.

From BrandWeek.com: "Nissan and Yahoo! Music take their online music partnership to MTV’s MHD (Music High-Definition) channel beginning this Monday, Sept. 17. The co-branded sets, which began in November, have featured a number of artists and genres,...

"The MTV broadcasts will run each month with a 30-minute set taped live on a Nissan-branded Fox studio lot in Los Angeles...

"Until now, the sets have been only available online at Yahoo! Music for download and viewing.

“'Consumers are very accustomed to seeing television content pushed on the Internet, but this collaboration with MHD allows Nissan and Yahoo! to be the first companies to do the opposite—show high definition Web content on television,' said Steve Kerho, director, Media & Interactive Marketing for Nissan, in a statement."

Read the entire article at BrandWeek.com.

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