Music subscriptions should be provided to students
A revolution has commenced.
In the first agreement of its kind, Pennsylvania State
University and Napster signed a deal Nov. 6 granting all Penn State
students memberships to the file sharing company’s “premium”
service at no additional charge to students. A win-win for both
sides, the deal frees the institution from liabilities incurred by
students downloading pirated music files and gives Napster a
tangible customer base in a prime age group.
This agreement also presents a golden opportunity for the
students of Colorado State: if we can establish our own
file-sharing deal without the active guidance of the CSU
administration, CSU would become the first institution to adopt the
service principally as an avenue of commerce and not as a tool to
reduce liability. By altering this main motivation for group
membership, CSU would establish itself alongside both Penn State
and Napster as an innovator in a new era of communication.
The new version of Napster, along with Apple’s iTunes, hopes to
harness the wild popularity of online file sharing and make the
practice profitable. Fundamentally different from the old version
of Napster and other file swapping services like Kazaa, Napster 2.0
and iTunes offer music, video and internet radio via a central
server as opposed to the person-to-person format which the other
older services use. This has advantages and disadvantages, the most
notable being that the quality of a download on the new systems is
guaranteed, but a permanent download isn’t free. Both new services
charge 99 cents to permanently download a song and $9.95 for an
album.
Napster 2.0 does have a main marketing advantage over iTunes by
offering what it calls a “premium” subscription service; for $9.95
a month, users have access to unlimited streaming downloads of most
of the 500,000 songs in Napster’s library as well as video files
and 40 commercial-free internet radio stations. As long as their
subscription is current, users are allowed to keep and listen to
files on their hard drive at no extra charge. If a user wants to
burn a song onto CD or transfer the file onto another medium, they
must pay 99 cents for it.
This subscription is what Penn State purchased and will make
available to all its 83,000 students over the next year. How much
did it cost the university? Bill Mahon, Penn State’s assistant vice
president of university relations said, “We have negotiated an
agreement with Napster that is so low we are not permitted to say
the price.” He further elaborated on how the service would be paid
by Penn State’s University Technology fee, and how the current fee
will not need to be increased to accommodate the service. After
speaking with Mahon and taking into account the amount of business
Napster will gain from the deal, it is not unrealistic to estimate
the percent discount Penn State is receiving is somewhere in the
range of 99 to 100 percent, if not more, for 83,000 monthly
subscriptions.
Colorado State could be given a similar discount if we could
somehow separate ourselves from the bandwagon of other schools
attempting to follow the precedent of Penn State. The easiest way
to do this is to have students, not school officials, lead the way
in seeking out a service. Student demand for the service is rooted
in the very commercial desire to have cheap access to music that is
also legal, as opposed to an administration’s desire to coax
students into patronizing a legal form of downloading that is cheap
only to facilitate usage.
Associated Students of CSU is capable of rising to lead and
accomplish such a task, and the administration could then step back
and take an advisory role. In my opinion this structure would
accomplish a dual purpose of fortifying the student agenda and
legitimizing any negotiation between the university and a file
sharing company. The administration would also act as the final
executor of any agreement. According to ASCSU Vice President Katie
Clausen, who also chairs the Student Fee Review Board, student fee
changes are subject to final approval by a number of school
officials including the president and the board of governors.
The demand for a legal and thrifty alternative to online music
piracy is definitely present among both students and administrators
at Colorado State. CSU officials who are in a position to
officially comment could not be reached. I did, however reach a
number of officials in a number of departments who were unwilling
to comment about liabilities incurred on the university’s behalf by
the actions of students pirating music. If this subject is volatile
enough to make more than a few administrators abstain from making
any comment at all, this deafening silence bellows demand for a
remedy. If this demand is properly marketed to companies such as
Apple and Napster, CSU students could be gifted with a cheap and
legal source of online music. At the same time the university as an
institution would benefit from the notoriety gained through
innovation while limiting its liabilities.
Group access and rates to and for online file sharing services
might begin with educational institutions seeking to limit their
liabilities, but the idea will not linger in their exclusive
domain. This same type of group access could easily be adopted by
private corporations for exactly the same reasons universities are
interested in them. File sharing could easily become the biggest
technological breakthrough since the advent of the World Wide Web.
Some experts say it already is just that. With the right strategy
and a little luck, Colorado State could position itself on the
crest of this new wave.
Joe is a senior majoring in history. His column is available
every Thursday at no additional charge to students.
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