Trade groups for the music and movie industries held an early-evening party on Capitol Hill last night to let lawmakers and their staff members schmooze with representatives of the growing number of businesses offering tunes and flicks for a fee. The invitation-only event turned a caucus room of the Cannon House Office Building into a trade show of sorts: About 15 companies, including several that sell music and movie services to colleges, demonstrated their systems on large flat-panel computer monitors.
But many of the event’s 200 attendees—most of whom were Hill staff members or interns—skipped the product demonstrations and headed straight to the open bar. They stayed around just long enough for the evening’s main attraction, a four-song performance by Lifehouse, a rock group known for its swoony postgrunge ballads. Before the band took the stage, a DJ from a local radio station asked the crowd to give a round of applause for "everyone who’s ever downloaded a song legally." There was more polite nodding than clapping.
In the end, it was unclear whether the company representatives on hand actually got much face time with lawmakers. A staff member for Sen. Norm Coleman, a Republican from Minnesota, summed up the feel of the evening: She was not there in her official capacity, she said. She just showed up because she heard Lifehouse was playing.
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