Biz Sees Campus Progress

The music industry is giving high marks to efforts to address illegal file-sharing on college campuses.

"Compared to the beginning of last year's school session, there has been a sea change in the university digital music landscape," Recording Industry Assn. of America president Cary Sherman says.

Sherman also serves as co-chairman of the Joint Committee of the Higher Education and Entertainment Communities, which was formed two years ago by the RIAA and university officials, to address illegal file-sharing on campuses.

"New partnerships between legal music services and universities are beginning to proliferate, and schools are moving to get a technological handle on bandwidth-clogging file-sharing networks," Sherman adds.

Sherman says there are programs to provide students with legitimate online services at 20 U.S. universities and colleges, with more on the way.

Committee co-chairman Graham Spanier, president of Pennsylvania State University, says the Napster service at Penn State has yielded a significant decrease in peer-to-peer file-sharing and reduced the university's need for external bandwidth.

Spanier says that most participating schools include the cost of a legitimate digital-music service in an overall technology fee. Students pay no additional charge for the service unless they want to download tracks.

Anticipating back-to-school season, MusicNet, Napster and Rhapsody have discounted subscription deals to appeal to college students. The deals were created in collaboration with another record industry initiative, the Campus Action Network.

MusicNet's subscription service will be available to students at Marietta College, Ohio University, Rochester Institute of Technology and University of Denver.

The service is bundled with video-on-demand and educational media services from Denver-based Cdigix (formerly Cflix). Students pay a $2.99 monthly subscription rate; song downloads are 89 cents each.

The schools join current Cdigix partners Wake Forest University and Yale University.

Napster has worked out a deal with Vanderbilt University to give students a discounted subscription rate of $16 for the academic year. Napster allows Vanderbilt faculty and staff to subscribe for $6.95 per month, $3 less than its normal monthly fee. The school's students, faculty and staff also can purchase downloads for 99 cents per song or $9.95 per album.

Napster has similar distribution deals with Cornell University, George Washington University, Middlebury College, University of Miami, University of Southern California, Wright State University and University of Rochester.

Rhapsody inked its first college partnerships with University of California at Berkeley and University of Minnesota. Students at both schools can subscribe to Rhapsody at a discount of at least 66% from the normal price of $9.95 per month. Individual tracks will run 79 cents.

APPLE'S APPROACH

Digital music leader Apple has an iTunes on Campus program at 55 schools that permits distribution of free iTunes software and volume discounts on song purchases. The company also struck a deal in June to distribute iPods to incoming Duke University freshman.

Apple has been the subject of campus buzz for another reason as well. Savvy programmers have been unraveling the copyright protections built into iTunes and converting its ability to stream music between computers on a local network into a download function. The result is akin to P2P on a local network.

Apple has had some success thwarting this activity with software upgrades. In April, it blocked MyTunes, a program created by a Trinity College student. However, students then started circumventing iTunes upgrades with OurTunes, which was created by a Stanford University programmer, and Get Tunes.