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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."
This sounds quite a bit like music vs. data CD-R's and the 'tax' to the music industry that we pay.
The real question is, what if I don't have a computer in my dorm room? Do I still have to get stuck paying this?
They're getting the idea now. The market has established exactly what it wants: easy access to media. Not free access, because many people pay for high-bandwidth connections for this purpose.
Examine what your target market is doing, then change the business model to match. It makes perfect sense and they're finally catching on.
It reminds me of George Washington Carver's solution to a problem. The university students were walking on the grass instead of the paved walks, and wearing muddy trails. Carver simply noted where the students walked, and put sidewalks there. Problem solved.
...
How about we tax our students $25-$30 apiece per term, send you the money, and you don't send us all those C&D letters and subpoenas?
CEE5210S The signal SIGHUP was received.
No kidding. Speaking as a college student, I don't have money to pay my back balance for summer tuition, let alone pay for music. Especially when I'm paying for other people's bribes. If they don't want to get caught, quit sharing your music, and put up a firewall. Damn script kiddies are trojaning boxes and using them as remote servers all over on campus (here)
--fetch daddy's blue fright wig, i must be handsome when i release my rage
Surely they could make it 'free' by including advertising eg. five free plays for an advert. I guess the music biz could also use the students as guinea pigs to find out what they like to listen to. To which the answer is almost certainly 'free stuff' ...
Don't go to a brothel if you want to buy broth
so what happens if you don't like the crap they wanna force-feed everyone?
what if your style is industrial, ambient, techno, folk, noise - whatever... stuff that isn't top-40 is most likely going to be ignored completely; and these students will still be forced to pick up the tab
There's a 'field house' here at the university; a nice recreation facility, but there was a HUGE uproar from students who didn't want to foot the 40$ per semester fee to use it whether they'd actually use it or not - i forsee similar outcries about any service which likely would suck for all but the lowest common denominator - pop music is all you'll see, and it's what we're all force-fed right from the start
www.necroticobsession.com
Perhaps they should consider setting up some shoutcast/icecast style stations to stream music over the college LAN? Assuming it can be done cheaply and legally, this would be pretty neat. If people like the radio stations enough, they will spend less time messing with MP3's.
It would sure beat a DRM'ed library of music that I have to pay for, that would lack the convience,variety, and quality of what is already on my harddrive.
Most universities are terrified, repeat, terrified, of being legally liable for anything. They are doubtless motivated in this case not by the desire to provide music to students, but to provide assurance that they are not going to be sued, no matter how unlikely it may be.
Does anybody remember how the RIAA quietly went around and threatened to sue universities that did not block Napster? Right after this happened, mine announced they were blocking Napster because of 'bandwidth' reasons. This is the same kind of situation, the universities are just dying to pay protection money. They will do anything to avoid the high costs and bad publicity that could come with a lawsuit.
Legality means nothing to me. I'm not going to switch to a pay service unless it can provide things that Kazaa can't. High quality, full albums, with no DRM. If I can't send copies of songs to my friends over IM, it's worthless in my book.
Also, if it became a 'fee', all hell would break loose. Colleges already charge a crapload for extra stuff lots of people never use, just on the assumption that you "might" use it.
Examples: (per semester at Virginia Tech)
Student activity fee: $113 (most student activities suck)
Athletic fee: $116 (gym crowded, and don't have to attend gym to excercise)
Rec Sports Fee: $71 (the funny thing is most people who actually do rec sports have to buy their own gear as well)
Bus fee: $30 (I use it, but many others don't)
Pay each of those twice a year and that's $660. I don't even want to think about what the "music fee" would be.
Oh great! This will be the social and technical test bed for the roll out of the RIAA's favored version of Digital Rights Management. While Johnny is off at University being taught what passes for critical thinking he can be indoctrinated into the RIAA's future music licensing paradigm. After all, why sell physical copies of licensed work just ONCE when you can continuously charge per student/per month for the same content?
*** This Month Only!: The Metallica add on pack is
only one penny more for the first three months*
*One year contract at standard pricing required.
After providing this "service" to the nation's colleges for a time the RIAA will have trained the next generation of music consumers to accept usurious licensing fees in exchange for digitally managed content without batting an eye.
*** Note: Beginning next month all Britney Spears
content will be disabled pending the release of her new masterwork - - "Ooops, I made Millions again"!
yeesh,
Fibonacci Ceres
The service will be streaming only, DRM windows media files (or similar) at lowish quality. It's tasters to get you to buy more from the service providers. All you'll get is IP authorised access to a few promotional pages on Itunes or Pressplay. Either you can stream all at low quality, or a selected older releases / parts of albums. They'll have almost no classical / folk / jazz either I bet.
-Bob
I envision that every university could build a giant information repository in the center of their campuses. These massive edifices could act as a storehouse for books, magaizines, music cds and other forms of data. To gain entry the supplicant would need a badge of identification.
I shall call my creations LIBRARIES and students will flock to them.
Seriously folks, Universities have the infrastructure already. Have the library buy the CD. Load the CD on a server and seal the origional in a vault. Stream the cds to the users (athenticated via library card). Set the server to one stream per purchased copy and it is all fair use. How alout them apples RIAA!
SD
âoeWho knew something as harmless as willful ignorance could end up having real consequences?â
One thing that's been left out of the debate thus far is the role of University communities in the production of music. And of course they are free to freely distribute on their own internal networks music which they have written and produced.
Universities have music programmes --everything from aspiring rock and roll bands to amateur chorale groups and semi-professional jazz ensembles, to chamber orchestras and full-blown symphony orchestras. Has the RIAA taken so much control over the terms of the debate that the role of University communities in providing cheap or free innovative cultural events is pushed so far over to one side as to be completely missing? Personally, I think the Universities have a duty to their students to discourage the RIAA crap music and provide a superior product themselves -- in the name of education.
As an example, a coffeehouse at Cornell, we had a folk concert series called "Bound for Glory" that usually featured one local or not-so-local artist and an opening act by a student or student group. And it was broadcast free-to-air on the campus radio station. What better way is there for students to learn about music performance, production and distribution than for them to DO IT THEMSELVES? The Talking Heads started out at RISD, and the music scene surrounding the university community in Athens, Georgia is legendary for producing such bands as REM and The Indigo Girls. Carnegie Mellon University would be the ideal place to start producing its own MP3s for distribution on campus, because it has both one of the best Computer Science departments in the country and one of the best music schools in the country. In cities like Boston and New York, you could have consoria, between, say, MIT nad the Boston Conservatory of Music; between Columbia and Julliard. I can see NYU publishing its own film productions on internal broadband, UCLA and USC as well. Certainly, they're already doing things like this, but why not promote it to students as a much better thing to do than downloading some crap 80's music that you can hear on the radio anyway?
Quite frankly, I'm really disappointed with both the musical taste and leadership of college students that are such passive consumers and apparently incapable of producing anything better than what the RIAA would sell them. Pathetic! Is it that they're so technically incompetent that they cannot find music on campus to record and distribute via mp3's-- or is it that their leadership and creative abilities are so underdeveloped that they can't even recognise what a fantastic opportunity it is to be at university, where there are already all of the facilities and pool of highly developed talent available to put on -- and electronically distribute -- creative productions?
I think the Universities should seize the high ground they have such easy access to. In 5 years the RIAA will be begging the Universities for access to the Universities' MP3 archives for wider distribution. You know, those early recordings of the frat party gigs of the student band that went platinum after graduation. That remarkable performance of early church music on the University's collection of medeival instruments. Stephen Speilberg started his career with a student film at USC, and Spike Lee started his career with student films at NYU. Why not have a media server plus a critical forum for viewing and commenting on student films, student music, student plays? The HECK with the *crap* the RIAA is laying claim to. They can KEEP it. Sheesh!
People deliberately go to University in order to be exposed to the good stuff, and to hone their critical thinking via discourse with the best -- i.e. why Mahler trumps Britney Spears and why Melville is better than Mills and Boon. The Universities are doing the students a disservice in protecting the students from RIAA legal moves -- not that they should be offering legal protection when they steal other artists' copyrighted (a
Is it just me or have unis forgotton that they're in the business of providing education?
Don't be so sure. Yes, that's the ideal, but schools are are a business, and that means their ultimate goal is to survive and make money.
Don't think for a minute that if your school pays the RIAA $10/student that you as a student are also going to pay $10. It will be more like $50 (Entertainment Fee).
Schools already do this with long distance. They pay about 2.9c/minute and charge students between 10 and 25. I know the school I worked at really hates that so many students are using cellphones with unlimited LD... it's really cut into the bottom line. I'm sure they'd love to find a way to make that back up through some kind of "communications/technology fee" that allows students to download music and gives the schools indemnity from lawsuits.
Everybody wins, except, of course, the student.
Unless maybe you are at a music school? Or are taking music classes? Oh wait, knowledge of the arts is worthless knowledge. Actually, it is not knowledge at all, and anyone who says it is is just trying to trick you.
I know the plan sounds like it is more of an 'entertainment' package, but it could be related to the school's curriculum, if it were open ended enough to be used that way.
This is nothing new. When I attended U of MD, there was a manadatory fee for tickets to all the home games. Didn't matter if you wanted to attend or not (like me and many of my friends), you paid for the tickets. Now here is what really pissed me off. If you didn't pick up your tickets to the next game by a certain time (yes, you had to go get a new ticket for each game), they would offer the "extra" tickets for general sale. Talk about double dipping. Of course, the university never gave any refund to those whose tickets were sold.
So let's see if I got this straight,
I have never purchased a music cd, all my music consisting of albums and cassettes. Yet if I decide to go back to college, I'm going to be paying shakedown money straight out of my tuition, with nothing to say about it?
Sort of like the student fees you are forced to pay for the communist public interest research groups, along with their wacko activism you are forced to support.
So do the students and colleges get protection from p2p lawsuits, or do the media/entertainment syndicate get to shake us down again when they need to make the next quarter's revenue projections?