Byline: David McGuire

Jenny Toomey has just about had it with the unending fuss over file-sharing and illegal music downloads.

"To be honest, it's hard for me to even do this interview because I'm so bored of it. I was bored of it when we started in 2000," Toomey said between sips of a peach smoothie at the Fresh Fields grocery store near her home in northwest Washington, D.C.

By turns businesswoman, think-tank director and semi-iconic indie rocker, Toomey is spoken for; she would rather find ways to make sure independent artists can afford a meal than fret over whether music piracy is costing the entertainment industry a few million of its many billions of dollars.

"When you're focusing on the black-and-white issues, the artists are never represented in the discussion. As we continue to try to polarize people, artists aren't on the black side or the white side. The thing they really care about is getting paid, and being respected and having control of their art," said Toomey, who as former lead singer of D.C.-based indie-rock outfit Tsunami, knows what it's like to live south of the poverty line.

But her antipathy may strike some as ironic considering that Toomey will host the fourth annual Future of Music Coalition Policy Summit on Sunday and Monday at The George Washington University, an event that attracts record company executives, artists, file-sharing service hosts, lawmakers and civil libertarians.

For them, file-sharing will be a marquee issue, and Toomey's conference has become a sort of Switzerland where all sides can discuss it in a neutral environment.

"It's become a place where people want to come because there's an interest in dialogue from all sides. They've done an interesting job of making the conference a multilayered exploration of lots of different things," said John Simson, executive director of SoundExchange, a company formed

by the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) to collect music royalties on behalf of artists and record labels.

Adam Eisgrau, executive director of P2P United, a lobbying group that represents file-sharing companies like Morpheus and eDonkey, echoed Simson's assessment, though he rarely finds himself agreeing with the music industry.