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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.
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
"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.
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.
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
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
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
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.