Universities Mull Official Role In Music Distribution

An anonymous reader writes "News.com.com is reporting that Universities are considering ways to bring legal Internet jukeboxes to dorm rooms, including entering deals with commercial service providers that would see online music charges included alongside tuition fees or picked up by the schools themselves." Reader ajkst1 adds that "meetings were held between college representatives, music industry reps, and online music services such as Apple's iTunes Music Store, Pressplay, and Listen.com. The discussion wasn't about why they should do it, but about how they should do it. Per-user licenses or a general fee to students were discussed to make it look like the music was free. I'm broke, so free is good. Paying more to go to school is bad."

Comments

MIT is trying something like this

[CommanderTaco]

ok, i confess i didn't read the article, but a recent mit project seems related: LAMP FAQ (scroll down a bit). offering cds over cable with an internet based request system. still in beta right now.

Enjoy Free Legal Music with iRATE radio

[MichaelCrawford]

You can enjoy free music downloads without getting in trouble by listening to the music that many artists make available on their own websites in hopes of attracting fans. And you can tell the RIAA to kiss your ass.

But there is the problem of finding the music, and weeding out the bad stuff without actually having to download and play it all.

This problem is solved with iRATE radio's collaborative filtering:

iRATE radio is a collaborative filtering client/server mp3 player/downloader. The iRATE server has a large database of music. You rate the tracks and it uses your ratings and other peoples to guess what you'll like. The tracks are downloaded from Web sites which allow free downloads of their music.

iRATE radio's server has 46,000 tracks registered in its database - so if you use iRATE, you don't need to go hunting for music anymore. All of these are legal downloads from websites like mine. (I compose for the piano.)

The way iRATE works is that it downloads a few tracks at random at first. It downloads them directly from the artists' Web sites after finding them in its database. (The author of iRATE is careful to register only legal downloads.) After you listen to and rate the tracks, your ratings are sent back to the server where it uses statistical analysis to correllate your ratings with the ratings given by other users. If you like the same kind of music I do, then iRATE will send you all the same music I like. Conversely, if you hate my music, iRATE won't send you the music I like.

iRATE is a java program, known to work on Windows, Linux and Mac OS X. The client and server are both Free Software, licensed with the GPL.

Here's some screen shots.

While iRATE works on Mac OS X, it could stand some improvement. Apple provides a package which can give java programs a native Mac OS look and feel. The project is actively seeking Mac OS X java programmers

Re:Enjoy Free Legal Music with iRATE radio

[Psychic Burrito]

Cool name, and a cool concept! However, it didn't work for me: It started up, began downloading some songs, but even after 3 songs had been downloaded, I still couldn't command the first song to start playing: Doubleclicking doesn't work, as well as clicking the ">>" button.

Actually, I think that this app suffers quite a bit from a bad interface. I'm not sure if the ">>" button starts playing or fast forwards to the next song. The ">>" is normally used to indicate fast forwarding, but in this case the ">>" is part of a group of two buttons with the other being "||", which always indicates "Pause", so I'm inclined to think that the ">>" is meant to indicate "play". Note thought, that a "Play" button is normally using a single triangle pointing to the right for this cause.

Additionaly, I think the idea that every user needs to rate every song
- takes a lot of effort,
- won't work with thousands of songs
- is not what users expect from a radio and
- doesn't leverage the fact that everything is interconnected:
How about if ratings would be analyzed and listeners automatically put together into groups of same taste. That way, iRate learns from everybody and after some training, I get lots of new music I never have heard before but which matches exactly my taste.

Just a few ideas. Cheers!

Its not about music, its about 40% more tuition!

[BrookHarty]

Don't know if anyone has been paying attention, but in California, but they raised tuition 10% in the first quarter of 03, and now another 30% recently. And had to cut many programs due to the states 700 million dollar education cut because of the 38 billion state budget overrun. Its not just california that has these budget problems, its happening all over the country.

So while I like the idea of them trying provide free music for the students (or seem free), its more of a value added feature when you have to pay 40%+ more in tuition.

It must be a tough to attract kids to colleges with these budget costs, cutting fund for additional programs, and the harsh job market for software/computer related jobs. Anything they can do to make the life a little easier on the students is almost a business decision, a very smart one.

Gotta see the trees through the forest, Free music for colleges is more about avoiding lawsuits, tuition prices and attracting students.

Sharing provides a MUCH wider choice.

[Anonymous Coward]

I like the Apple Music Store. In the past week I've purchased twenty songs.

I've also been checking through the approximately 200 songs I've downloaded from Kazaa/AudioGalaxy/Napster.

It turns out that LESS THAN TWENTY of them are available through the Apple store. They're just too old (Billy Murray), too weird (Beau Hunks), not of interest to enough people (Bernard Cribbins).

In virtually every case where I choose an artist I liked from the Fifties, I'll find that Apple Music Store has the "16 Most Requested Songs" album from whatever company puts those out. And they're good. But that's all. The sharing services always have far more.

Sharing lets people with unusual interests give access to their collections. It also, probably, contributes to the longevity of this music by making multiple electronic copies available, rather than confining it to a shrinking number of copies in the hands of collectors.

Re:It's a work in progress

[Psychic Burrito]

Hello Michael, I've already found out what the bug was and entered my problems in iRates bug list:

• Cannot play back songs (OS X)

The problem was with running iRate directly off the supplied read-only disk image. Once I moved it, everything worked fine.

I also added a few additional bug reports, which I won't repeat here. Keep this great program up, it has a lot of potential! :-)

One last note - or more of a which, actually: iRate eats CPU cycles like whales eat krill. A non-Java version would be much, much appreciated :-) Cheers!

Re:Not first post but close

[whatch durrin]

If you attend a music school, or are taking music classes, chances are you can check out the music in question from the library.

If the uni's library doesn't have it, travel to the local public library. They probably do.