[Infowarrior] - College Music Sites: Free, Legal and Ignored

[Richard Forno]

Free, Legal and Ignored
Colleges Offer Music Downloads, But Their Students Just Say No;
Too Many Strings Attached
By NICK TIMIRAOS
July 6, 2006; Page B1
http://online.wsj.com/public/article/SB115214899486099107-vuoIhGUthiYcFwsQK0
DjegSRPwQ_20070706.html?mod=blogs

As a student at Cornell University, Angelo Petrigh had access to free online
music via a legal music-downloading service his school provided. Yet the
21-year-old still turned to illegal file-sharing programs.

The reason: While Cornell's online music program, through Napster, gave him
and other students free, legal downloads, the email introducing the service
explained that students could keep their songs only until they graduated.
"After I read that, I decided I didn't want to even try it," says Mr.
Petrigh, who will be a senior in the fall at the Ithaca, N.Y., school.

College students don't turn down much that's free. But when it comes to
online music, even free hasn't been enough to persuade many students to use
such digital download services as Napster, Rhapsody, Ruckus and Cdigix. As a
result, some schools have dropped their services, and others are considering
doing so or have switched to other providers.

To stop students from pirating music, more than 120 colleges and
universities have tried providing free or subsidized access to the legal
subscription services over campus networks in the past few years. About 7%
of all four-year schools and 31% of private research universities provided
one of the legal downloading services, according to a 2005 survey of 500
schools by the Campus Computing Project, a nonprofit that studies how
colleges use information technology. Universities typically pay for the
services, some with private grants and others through student fees. While a
typical monthly subscription to Napster is $9.95, the schools have been able
to cut special deals, funded in part by record companies.

Purdue University officials say that lower-than-expected demand among its
students stems in part from all the frustrating restrictions that accompany
legal downloading. Students at the West Lafayette, Ind., school can play
songs free on their laptops but have to pay to burn songs onto CDs or load
them onto a digital music device.

There's also the problem of compatibility: The services won't run on Apple
Computer Inc. computers, which are owned by 19% of college students,
according to a 2006 survey of 1,200 students by the research group Student
Monitor. In addition, the files won't play on Apple iPods, which are owned
by 42% of college students, according to the survey.

"People still want to have a music collection. Music listeners like owning
their music, not renting," says Bill Goodwin, 21, who graduated in May from
the University of Southern California in Los Angeles. USC decided last year
that it was finished with Napster after fewer than 500 students signed up,
and it moved to Ruckus, hoping students would find that service more
appealing.

Meanwhile, both Cornell and Purdue will no longer offer their students free
music next year. An anonymous donor had paid for Cornell to offer Napster
for two years, but the student government passed on a chance to keep the
service by charging students a fee. "There hasn't been an overwhelming
response to keep it," says Kwame Thomison, Cornell's student assembly
president. "Students that enjoyed the service enough can pay for it
themselves."

The number of students using Napster at George Washington University dropped
by more than half between the first and second year, from one-third to
one-seventh of eligible users. Alexa Kim, who oversees the Washington
school's program, attributes the higher use at the start to the service's
novelty and to press attention during the inaugural year. She adds that the
university hasn't decided if it will renew its contract.

Colleges started offering the services in part because they were concerned
that the recording industry might try to hold them liable for their
students' copyright violations. So far no schools have been sued by the
recording industry.

Universities also have another reason for reducing illegal downloading: The
large amount of bandwidth used by movie and music downloads chokes
universities' computer networks. The subscription services complement
university filtering programs that can identify users who are misusing
school networks. "The bandwidth that I recovered saved us $75,000 a year in
network costs," says Matthew Jett Hall, assistant vice chancellor at
Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tenn. The university's Napster program
requires users to pay $2 a month for unlimited downloads.

The Recording Industry Association of America says it has been happy with
the progress the program has made so far. "Universities tend to move not all
that quick to do things like this, so it's really quite an achievement,"
says RIAA President Cary Sherman.

Some schools that don't offer free downloads dismiss the subscription
services as too costly for the results they achieve, especially because so
many students now buy music from Apple's iTunes Music Store. "We were not in
a position to offer an alternative to iTunes," says Lev Gonick, the chief
information officer at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland. "The
alternatives looked like they had more sizzle than steak."

There is also little consensus among administrators about how successful the
services have been in eliminating piracy. Although some say complaints from
the recording industry have dropped sharply, no one can tell if that's
because fewer students are engaging in illegal file-sharing or if the
industry simply doesn't want to go after schools that are spending money to
combat the problem. "The RIAA's push to buy into these services strikes me
as protection money. Buy in and we'll protect you from our lawsuits," says
Kenneth C. Green, the Campus Computing Project's director.

The RIAA denies the charge. "We do sue students and send takedown notices to
universities that have legal services all the time," says Mr. Sherman.
Universities have a particular responsibility to teach students the value of
intellectual property, he adds, because they are "probably the No. 1 creator
of intellectual property." And he disputes the idea that the subscription
services have fallen out of favor. The number of campuses that subscribe
will increase "pretty significantly" in the fall, he says.

Even at schools where more than half of the students use the services, few
choose to buy songs. Only 2% of students at the University of Rochester in
New York reported buying a song that they had downloaded from Napster in a
fall 2005 survey of about 700 students. In the same survey, 10% said they
downloaded songs from other services -- not necessarily legally -- after
finding one they liked on Napster.

"There isn't that much we can do," acknowledges Aileen Atkins, Napster's
senior vice president for business affairs and general counsel. "If they
have an iPod, they're going to buy it on iTunes. It's a fact of life."

Write to Nick Timiraos at nick.timiraos at wsj.com