Legit music busts out on campus
By JEFFERSON GRAHAM
No longer a site for illegal downloads, Napster.com has had success in signing university campuses to inexpensive student music plans.
When Lisa Staib was choosing colleges this spring, her cousin, a Penn State student, helped sway her decision by describing an unusual campus perk: free Napster.
A onetime Internet music outlaw, Napster's gone legit. And it's competing with the biggest firms in the industry -- including Sony, Apple, Microsoft and Wal-Mart -- to get students and other music fans to buy songs online instead of stealing them.
Colleges are hotbeds of music piracy. To give students a legal alternative, digital music meisters are wooing campuses with generous deals on Internet music-on-demand.
Penn State struck the first deal with Napster in January. The trial program was so successful that many other schools took notice. Now, when students return to school at Penn State and many other top colleges, they'll find free, legal digital music as the latest amenity, alongside cable TV and campus concerts.
More deals ahead
About 25 of the nation's 3,300 colleges will offer music to their students on campus networks this fall. An additional two dozen or more are finalizing deals in coming weeks.
"There are very few things in life that are more important to students than music," says Penn State President Graham Spanier. "Any school that buries its head in the sand on this is not serving its students well."
Students at schools such as Penn State and Cornell University will have access to Napster as part of tuition. Normal subscription rates are $9.99 a month. Other schools are cutting deals to make subscriptions available to students at discount rates.
"It clearly has reduced the need to pirate songs," Spanier says.
But it certainly hasn't eliminated the problem. The licensed services still have gaping holes in their catalogs -- no Beatles or Led Zeppelin, for instance -- while so-called peer-to-peer (P2P) programs such as KaZaA and eDonkey seem to have everything, plus movies, TV shows and oodles of porn.
Even with a celestial jukebox that amounts to a virtual well-stocked record store, the industry has a ways to go to change consumer behavior.
Weaning college students from P2P services "is going to be a significant hurdle," says P.J. McNealy, an analyst at American Technology Research. "Colleges are P2P factories."
The original Napster was created in Boston in a Northeastern University dorm room in 1998 by Shawn Fanning as a tool to help students get easier access to Internet music files, commonly referred to as MP3s.
The music industry hasn't been the same since. Many record stores, especially in college towns, have shut down, as students responded to free MP3s by no longer buying CDs.
Lawsuits continue
Even in the face of record-label lawsuits against song swappers --nearly 4,000 have been sued since September -- online swapping is bigger than ever. Internet measurement firm BigChampagne says 1 billion songs were available for online trading in June.
More file swapping takes place on college campuses than anywhere else, says Cary Sherman, president of the Recording Industry Association of America, which has been fighting to recover from a three-year, 18 percent drop in CD sales. The association says $4.2 billion is lost each year from file swapping.
The fall college digital musical alliances will teach students "that music isn't something that should be stolen but paid for," says Sherman. "Hopefully, they will carry that with them for the rest of their lives."
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