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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."
Damn the costs for college keep going up....
Beer, fake id's, drugs, now I have to pay for music? WTF!?
Most college students are poor anyway, nobody'll subscribe to this crap.
Sig & Below
Yuck Fou
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.
This is just another example of "all students pirate music, so let's charge them for it".
It's not the university's responsibility to take all the students' money and then provide all kinds of services. The university should charge for and provide essential services (these days that could include internet) and let the students' spend their remaining money as they see fit. Universities should not dictate the entertainment of their students.
DO NOT WRITE IN THIS SPACE
okAs much as I'd like to see legal distribution of music... a situation where my college tutition is going to something I don't want to use. (Maybe I support indies for example) Then by merely going to college I am supporting and giving money to the RIAA whether or not I will use their product.
This program should include an opt-out option, at the very least.
Furthermore... it will be interesting to see if the files they feed the students (which they will have paid for) will be useless due to DRM. There is an increasing number of college students running linux. If they have to pay for something they can't use... they are not going to be happy. And neither will I... and my tax money helps fund the public universities and I would prefer to not have my tax money going to the RIAA, seeing as they may not pay for it all with tutition increases. Even if my tax money doesn't go to the RIAA, a government sanctioned organization should not be forcing it's students to pay (in their tutition) for a monopilies product... although there are plenty of examples of them already doing that...
I touch computers in naughty places
I can't believe these schools are seriously considering making a deal with the music industry. What if I simply don't care about all that commercial crap they throw on the market year in and out? Who's next? Drug dealers? It's bad enough that students get bombarded with credit card offers the day they start college. Nothing like getting into dept and starting off the 'American way of life' - now the music pushers want their cut too? Not to overreact here, but does anyone else feel less and less like a citizen and increasinly just like a f....ing consumer? There is someting terribly wrong with this picture - commercial entities should stay out of academic organizations as much as possible - basta! Just my 2 cents - things are really getting out of hand out there...
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
Yeah, you would. Most (or I daresay, ALL) colleges have publicly accessible computers, or at least accessible to all students, and if they were paying for the services, they'd be likely to have the client installed on such computers.
One possibility, though, would be for students to waive the fee, either because of financial or moral reasons. Such an individual would need to sign a waiver of some sort, but this is the system that the Univ. of Arizona uses to put a lot of small -- but non-mandatory -- fees on all the students' bills. Students have the choice to not fund things like the Rec Center and Student Body, but virtually all of them do. It works pretty well, keeping the naysayers from making a huge issue of the fees, while still providing almost 100% of the funding that a mandatory fee would.
I thought the reason to go to college was supposedly to learn things. Silly me. Now everyone who goes to college will be paying extra so they can have access to music they probably don't give a damn about.
This reminds me of the Internet tax, by which everyone would have to pay extra money for their Internet connections so a few dolts could get free music legally.
I already get free music legally: I compose it. Necessitating that I pay more for something unrelated so I can have the opportunity to get something I don't want or need is absurd.
Fortunately, I'm not in college anymore. For the sake of everyone who still is, I hope this proposal dies like the Internet tax one did.
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.
Of course, if a college offered "free" DRM'd music, and people continued to share unencumbered music, maybe they'd get a clue. I can guarentee free music in open formats would kill P2P at a college.
Litigious bastards
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.
"There is no such thing as a free lunch."
Maybe this is just my gut reaction, but maybe colleges should be spending their time working on EDUCATION and not SELLING MUSIC. Leave that to the music companies, stores, etc.
Stuff like this is symptomatic of a (youth) obsession with music. Personally, I'm completely sick of hearing about music[companies,sharing,piracy], and I think that both the music companies and media(inc. slashdot) continuously overstate the significance/importance of music. You can rape 'em at the voting booth(if they even show up), you can make it nearly impossible for 'em to travel without the government massively invading their privacy(on the assumption hijackers will use real names, birthdays, etc)...and they won't even lift an eyebrow. Tell 'em they can't "share" their music, and they get absolutely RIPSHIT.
God forbid we should worry about the important things, like who is going to pay for our parent's medical care, our environment, our rights as individual citizens, our massively corrupt politicians, overpopulation, corporate greed...
Please help metamoderate.
As a student that dislikes the common pop music (i.e. Top40, Top200, TopAnything) I don't want to pay for the RIAA POP music agenda. If this program however would introduce indie bands and struggling musicians on the Jukebox I'd be all for it. I think that all the general student population needs is a little exposure to some alternate choices. However I maybe to generous to the tendencies of undergrad students.
Where the Music Matters
Anyone have any idea which colleges/universities are involved with this? The article doesn't mnetion any, and I'd like to know if mine (or any of my friends') schools are involved so that I can get something together to express my opinion on (against) this.
This has been a test. Had this been a real emergency, we would have fled in terror and you would not have been informed.
The music services, along with a representative from Universal Music Group, explained that difficulties in licensing would make a Kazaa-style service impossible, however.
And thus, it will fail. College Students tend to have the most diverse of music tastes, and from what I have read about the various music services, most of what is available is the more popular current music. Beatles and Rolling Stones tunes are next to impossible to come by.
We all want the best, not some half assed attempt at pretending this is better. If I can't get my music from their legitimate service, I'm going to get it elseware.
Also, from my understanding of state laws, State owned (and funded) schools would likely have a difficult time getting something like this started, "A mandatory fee for a commercial service not provided by a university" wouldn't look very good on a budget itinerary for a cash strapped (all) state.
The article mentions that initially the universities wanted a "Kazaa-like" system where students could get any file they wanted. This idea was shot down, so that means the music selection will be limited to whatever is included in the agreement. So students will have to pony up money for a service that has limited selection.
The article doesn't talk about DRM controls, but I would assume that the system would prohibit burning CD's and limit copying to portable devices. Excuse me, but isn't this already available to students (iTunes, Rhapsody, etc.) who want to pay for this service?
The music industry will get lots of revenue through these contracts, and the universities will get some legal coverage to avoid being dragged into court. The universities will probably even take on a service charge to whatever the music industry charges.
"We make our world significant by the courage of our questions and by the depth of our answers." Carl Sagan
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.
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'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
Request your free CD of my piano music.
I don't want the RIAA to see any more revenue from this or any other source. I hope those bloodsuckers go out of business.
Have a nice day.
http://yetanotherpoliticalrant.blogspot.com
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.
It also sounds as though colleges will pay a set fee per student, so they can use the service, thus supposedly freeing up the college of legal liability.
But wait, what happens if the college-affiliated jukebox doesn't carry, say, Rush's CD catalog? As a broke college student who already indirectly paid my $30 extra in tuition to subsidize this program, what am I likely to do? That's right, go onto a Kazaa and pirate those Rush CD's. And then we're right back where we started. And at that point, you can be sure that both my college and I are back on the hook, as far as the record companies are concerned.
More to the point, I think the most pressing concern is how much money from these college jukeboxes would be passed to the artist. The article makes no mention of this. And I'm inclined to think that when I download my DRM-crippled music, at this cut-rate University special fee, the artist is going to get shafted even more than if I had purchased a CD. And to me, the whole point of buying music is to support the artist. If a big chunk of my dollar doesn't support the artist, then piracy seems a moral option. I can always go to the artist's concert later, paying for tickets and t-shirts.
So to sum up, there's plenty of reason to be distrustful of this. It looks like a way for record companies to take $30 or whatever for each college student, and then to continue going after these same students, when they resort to piracy after realizing the college jukebox sucks.
I'm generally "Interesting," "Insightful," and even "Funny" here. What the hell happens to me at parties?
How about this... universities instead focus on improving their curriculum or improving the general state of student life on campus. How about investing more in improving general quality of living in dorm rooms, open up campus bookstores to the free market instead of monopolizing vendors like Follets. There are many worthwhile things universities SHOULD be doing for students instead of getting into the music business! Students WILL find a way to get their MP3s without the help of the school.
There are a lot major universities in dire straits financially, and of the ones I've observed, their problems are owed to very poor decision making by presidents and boards that don't know how to run universities as a business. If universities want to increase profits, they should reengineer their existing business processes
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.
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
-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
Paying more and having it go to the RIAA, or to some RAP artist who you would never support or listen to is even worse. Making all students pay for this, directly or indirectly, on the assumption that some will illegally copy music, is crazy.
I'm an American. I love this country and the freedoms that we used to have.
What on earth makes anyone think they deserve our money? The great music they promote? The way they gently nurture budding artists? How about how they promote honesty in our government? Bah!
Pay them nothing. Let them starve the way they let their artists starve. How on earth did we ever get to a place where a company can claim to own our culture, and even worse, have a lot of average joes believe that's the way it has always been?
Folks, we the people own our culture collectively. Yes, artists create, but without people watching/listening/enjoying the creation, it don't count for diddly squat. It's a conversation, you see, and twisting it into a monologue is just nuts.
So get up from the keyboard and do something about it. I personally am working hard on the Howard Dean presidential campaign, but take whatever approach you like. Just do something.
Do what you can, with what you have, where you are.
This sounds like one of the best ideas I've heard to take market dynamics out of music distribution.
Let me put it another way: Do any of you remember banalty tax from History of Western Civ 1?
Simply put, these are royalties due to an entity in exchange for a service, even if you don't use it. How do you "vote with your dollars" when you can't choose what your dollars go towards, or if your dollars can go at all?
On the flip side, this is a great deal for the music industry: They get a garunteed revenue stream for doing nothing. Hell, they can completely quit producing new or interesting works and continue getting paid for 95 years, with that back-library of theirs.
This also sets a great example for the economics students. Who needs all those complicated supply/demand and market dynamics theories? All you have to do to get rich is convince someone you deserve a tax revenue. This can be a private institution (Universities, in this case) or the Federal government (place a media tax on something and funnel the money back to you). Why work for hard-core capitalism when you can have the much simpler capitalistic socialism?
Cue the banalty song.
I'm as mimsy as the next borogove but your mome raths are completely outgrabe.
- 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!
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?