ASHINGTON, 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, Clear Channel Communications, which since 1996 has grown from fewer than 40 radio stations to more than 1,200 nationwide.

"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.

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