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Students Skip College Music Services
WSJdpatton writes "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 the digital download services colleges and universities are providing." I know that the Ctrax service offered by my current school — Temple University — and many others (it's "available to all college students with a '.edu' email address") has an ugly, awkward interface. Worse, the free (gratis) part is an expiring, "tethered" collection of music for those who use it; downloads to keep are fee-per-track.
Just because a bag of crap is free doesn't mean it's worth the hassle of obtaining it.
"College students don't turn down much that's free ... downloads to keep are fee-per-track."
Surprise surprise!
If most of the services charge for downloads you can keep, its hardly free is it? In either sense of the word.
Maybe. But to make free content interesting, it has to be free in the OTHER sense first. If it's free in the financial aspect, that's a bonus, but not the primary concern.
That's the main beef I got with DRM. Not that I have to pay per view, or that I should pay more or whatever. It is the fact that I cannot use the content I pay for in an enjoyable way. It's the tether attached, not the price tag.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
It's one thing to pull an Apple and try to limit my music to one machine, but when my music needs to phone home once a week to unlock itself, that's a whole next level of wrong. I tried using our University's music system "Ruckus", but after the first "lockout" message I encountered during one of our frequent internet outages, I was done for life.
The reason why I don't use ruckus (or any other paid download service) is because of the incredibly lackluster selection that all music stores have. This isn't their fault - I imagine it would be hard to get the rights to sell obscure Norwegian death metal band's albums, but it still means that I'm double clicking Azuereus more than anything else.
Careful... there are lots of Free Software advocates around here that you're liable to upset!
Ok, want a big reason this failed? College students have varied and wide-ranging tastes in music. Your typical college frat-rocker or indie snob most likely won't like the range of artists offered on the "free" services when compared to itunes or any decent bittorrent tracker.
I guarantee that 90% of music reccomended by sites like Pitchfork aren't available on these services. If they were, people would use them.
"Its ease of use, speed, lack of viruses and spyware and affordable pricing are in line with what college students' seek today."
Z.
We also have CTrax available free at my school. Not many people use it, mainly because of the crippling DRM and crappyp interface. First, it requires you to use Windows + Internet Explorer + Activex plugins + Flash plugin + new Windows Media Player. That rules out a lot of students, myself included (though I tried for a short time). Then, of course, their whole clunky interface is done in Flash, is terribly slow, and just a general pain in the ass to use. They let you 'download' the WMA files from their service, but to actually play them, Media Player has to go through a godawful slow authentication process every single time you play the track. I assume the tracks will play in one of those ridiculous "Plays for Sure" portables, but I don't know anyone who has one (seriously.. who buys that crap!?).
I got so fed up with their stupid DRM that I even wrote a guide on how to get around it using Audacity (clunky, but effective). Even with the ability to rip the tracks to mp3s using Audacity or similar, it just wasn't worth the hassle of their terrible interface in order to access their limited track selection. I remember at least a few letters in our school paper complaining about the service and what a waste of money it is (apparently some "anonymous donor" funded it.. ). It's too bad Apple are so stringent with their pricing, or they could work out great deals with Unis that people wouldn't hate so much. Maybe CDigix have cleaned up their act in the year or so since I've used their service, but I doubt it, and I don't see myself going back even though it is free.
http://cltracker.net -- powerful craigslist multi-city search
It isn't possible to steal music unless it comes on CDs or tapes. If you meant that people copy it without permission, that's called copyright infringement.
You got that right, but I prefer the "free as in drugs" metaphor here. They are trying to get you hooked and then charge you for it later. What no one in the industry seems to get is that people will pay for the "free as in speech" type, and there are enough that care to be legal to make it a worthwhile model despite all the piracy. The industry tries so hard to stop the pirates that they turn the legit users into thieves.
Some people may remember RPI for its consistent involvement in the RIAA college lawsuits.
Needless to say, as soon as the first group of 30 were sued for using i2hub, the student council inexplicably gets an offer from the otherwise unknown music service known as Ruckus. The student council was at least nice enough to give us a chance to respond to a survey regarding our acceptance of a music service on campus, but despite an underwhelming response of 23%, RPI inexplicably chooses Ruckus to be its provider, despite the fact that 2/3rds of poll respondants wanted MP3 downloads, 90% wanted to burn CDs, and 85% wanted to download and own the music, and Ruckus is, of course, none of these, supporting only Microsoft DRM.
Despite some quiet rancor about the deal, and its possible relationship to a 'blackmail' deal with the RIAA, the student council twisted the facts and approved Ruckus anyway, intending to keep it through the 06-07 year, despite some qualms about its quality of service.
I haven't seen any long-term reviews of it either though, but I'm not particularly a fan of it. Too bad we students will have to pay for it in the end even if we don't want it.
A lot of universities offer free music subscriptions to stuff like Napster.
I think I must be the oddball because I have gone to PSU and use Napster quite a lot. Don't know what I'll do when the subscription goes away to be honest.
I'll tell you why I use it over pirating from a P2P system:
1. While I have it, it's legal.
2. While I have it, it's no more expensive than P2P.
3. Using Napster doesn't mean that when it goes away I can't go to P2P to get the same music.
4. It's a lot easier to download from Napster than it is from P2P... no worrying about firewalls blocking inbound ports, no worrying about share ratios, no worrying about "remotely queued"
5. I've seen D/L speeds of 2 MB/s. (Yes, that's BYTES, not bits.) Let's see you get that on P2P. (True, that's not reliable, but it's rare that you'll see a transfer go at under, say, 100 KB/s. At the same time, it's not uncommon to see P2P dls go at, say, 1 KB/s, especially when you take into account #4.)
6. It's a lot easier to find stuff I want on Napster, because they have all of the metadata correct. I can easily find all the tracks on an album, by an artist, etc. without having to worry if people are providing all of them.
7. I DON'T have to sort through 10 different versions of the same song that are all different somehow and try to figure out which one to get.
8. I DON'T have to worry about downloading a song and getting static, which has happened before.
Now, there are of course some drawbacks, such as it's harder to take it with you if you go on a trip, listen to in Linux, or keep after graduation (though none are impossible), and you have to deal with a really crappy interface, but there are a LOT of benefits over straight P2P.
I currently attend Penn State, where Napster is offered to students for free. I primarily use this program as a streaming service. Since I listen to such an extremely wide array of albums (not songs), that downloading would be pointless. I find that Napster is a perfect tool for finding independent and foreign artists; I can listen to new offerings without making an upfront investment as I would with a pay-per-track service such as iTunes.
I think Napster is perfect for people who have eclectic tastes in music and are interested in discovering new artists. I plan on buying a subscription when I graduate.
That would be stealing the *CD*, not the music. Now, stealing music would be more like doing what this sheriff is trying to do, but illegally.
I don't know how I would do that, however...
So you have a college students that want something, and another group that offers them something else and is suprised that the reaction of the students.
Does this not describe the entire recent history of the RIAA?
Stupid sexy Flanders.
True. It's worth mentioning that in the US at least, the penalties for copyright infringement are FAR harsher than those for stealing. Compare the max penalties for sharing a CD worth of songs (hundreds of thousands of dollars per track, if I remember correctly) to stealing a CD (I don't know, but I guarantee it's not hundreds of thousands).
My university allowed on-campus students to download music to their systems for free from CTrax. However, they dropped it during the spring. The reason is that nobody used it. It is not because they did not want free music, far from it. But when the service is much more trouble than it's worth, the people will just turn to other sources. I didn't use it for three reasons.
A) The interface was poorly designed and implemented in my opinion. A poor interface will stop a lot of people.
B) It forced the use of Internet Explorer on its site. I refuse to use IE. It is not because I am anti-MS, but it is because I have had serious problems in windows created by security flaws in IE. Furthermore, this dependency on IE screwed users of other OS's.
C) All of the music was wma format with DRM. I don't like DRM. Not only that, I fairly frequently reinstall windows on my machine because I frequently change hardware and/or toy with my system in various ways. Those files don't like being used after windows has been reinstalled due to previously stated hw changes.
Because of these problems, I found other sources for music.
This is not like software that you can just install and keep running.
The music checks back with the server every so often to make sure you are still authorized to play. If you are not listed as a student, your ability to play is gone.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
It's even less free than the 'voluntary library gift' (the $50 charge that GW puts on your bill each semester, that you have to request be removed).
It may be free in that you don't have to directly pay Napster, but the money has to come from somewhere -- it's probably covered under the 'Student Activities Fee' or one of the other many fees that you get hit with each semester.
(yes, I'm cynical -- I'm both an alum, and an ex-ISS employee. I've seen how much GW wastes on bad IT implementation. Hell, I even reported Nabih Bedewi to the engineering school for misappropriation of equipment almost a decade ago.)
Build it, and they will come^Hplain.
Can't keep the music after graduation? Can't burn songs to CD? That's not free. The WSJ should not have used that term so carelessly. They fell hard for typical RIAA propaganda. The RIAA routinely tries to swap black and white, and then acting as if everyone agrees with their interpretation, proceeds with all sorts of arguments that would make perfect sense if the foundation they were based on was solid.
I especially enjoyed Sherman's statement: 'Universities have a particular responsibility to teach students the value of intellectual property because they are "probably the No. 1 creator of intellectual property."' Many professors do their own thing of course, but too many professors are more interested in mining their grad students' ideas for things they can publish under their own names and get all the credit for themselves. The Universities quietly prefer this because they have rights over their employees' thinking, but not their customer's. And let's not forget the racket (usually university run, but not necessarily) whereby publishers cheat the professors who cheated the students. Next time you see one of those digital libraries that is pleased to offer the opportunity to purchase copies of a paper for the low low price of $10 each, know that the authors of that paper will receive precisely 0% of that money. Those are the values that are passed on, that those of you who have "paid your dues" and had the honor of having a professor lift your work out of the morass of trash and sloppy thinking and fix it up and publish it, can, if you choose, one day go on to become publishers or professors and get in on the gravy side of the racket.
I also enjoyed the whine about students spurning Napster to buy from iTunes.
Intellectual Property is a monopolistic, selfish, and defective concept. It is "tyranny over the mind of man"
When my dad when to college in the 50's, it was pretty affordable. The university offered the following services: classes, access to professors, labs, libraries. As nicities that also had housing, food, and athletic facilities.
Fast forward 50 years. Now the universities seem to be some kind of theme park, and as the mafia expression says, everyone pays. Why the hell are universities so much into the entertainment business that they're offering students involuntary music service subscriptions? Liability issues aside (I don't think the RIAA could win such a case against a university anyway), this is just f*@*ing ridiculous. Univerities do NOT need to be county clubs that happen to offer classes to interested sober members.
No, see, the F/OSS approach will be more along the rational and logical lines of pointing out that you:
A) should quit whining and fix it yourself already, since you already have the source,
B) are an idiot (doubly so if what you needed is related in any way to user interface, reading existing files, etc). We should have mandatory IQ tests to prevent idiots like you from getting anywhere near a computer,
C) should RTFM already. In fact, you should write the RTFM, since it doesn't exist yet. Get to it already.
D) are an idiot
E) are a MS fanboy and/or paid to call their favourite program crap
F) are an idiot. Even by MS shill/fanboy/etc standards.
G) should stop doing anything that can't be done with their program. In fact, you should feel _proud_ to abandon any work you need done, or spend a few months learning command-line ways to do it, just to show the middle finger to MS.
H) are an idiot for needing that, or for doing it like that, in the first place
I) are only using a closed-source program instead because you've pirated it. We just know you did.
J) did we mention that you're an idiot yet?
K) all the above
L) like K, and you're an idiot too
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