| Thursday, July 6, 2006 |
09:48 - Would you like a loss/damage waiver with those bits?
|
(top)  |
I was forwarded this Wall Street Journal article on how college students are being enticed by subscriptions to music download sites that operate on that basis, but they're still preferring to get their music the old-fashioned way: P2P.
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.
The rest is at the WSJ's pay site, but the gist is that even if the subscription services were offered for free, the students wouldn't touch them if it meant they couldn't keep their music. There's also this:
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.
. . .
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."
So it's even worse than they thought: not only will students choose illegal ownership over legal rentership if the cost is nil, they'll pay more for iTunes music just because it follows the model they like. And because it runs on Macs.
Nobody ever said college students were models of financial responsibility; but in this case they sure do seem to be models of the music-buying business at large.
|
|
Brian Tiemann
