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Colleges plan music services
Would charge students fee to download tunes over schools' networks

By Chris Gaither, Globe Staff, 9/3/2003

SAN FRANCISCO -- The tuition bill for some universities may soon include an unusual fee: for digital music.

In the latest effort to combat digital piracy, as many as two dozen universities nationwide this spring will start testing technology for delivering songs to their students over the Internet, recording industry officials and a prominent educator said yesterday.

Pennsylvania State University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology are among the schools considering such a service.

University administrators have been working closely with the recording and movie industries for the last year, trying to lighten the burden on their networks and reduce the risk of their students being sued for illegally sharing copyrighted files.

Schools have imposed limits on the amount of data traffic students can use, removed offenders from networks, and, for the first time this year, freshman orientation at universities like Boston College and Northeastern University included discussions about the legal hazards and moral implications of swapping songs and films over the Internet.

But Graham B. Spanier, president of Penn State and cochairman of a national committee of university and entertainment leaders, said yesterday that some students have simply ignored the warnings.

So Spanier wants to license songs from digital music providers, make them available to students through streaming or download, and tack a few dollars onto each student's bill in the same way that some universities now charge for cable television.

"If music is that important to our students, one of the things we might do is simply provide the music to them," he said. "We can make what is now illegal legal by giving students legitimate access to these services."

Spanier said he expects "a dozen or couple dozen" universities to launch test versions of their own music distribution programs during the spring semester. Aside from his own, he would not name those universities, citing their ongoing negotiations with digital music companies.

"This is really a ramp-up year to see how in a future year this might all work," he said.

The idea does not appear to have taken hold in the Boston area. Representatives from Boston University, Northeastern University, and Harvard University said they had no knowledge of their schools planning such online music services.

Northeastern, where the seminal music-sharing program, Napster, was created by then-student Shawn Fanning, considered a proposal to start its own music distribution service earlier this year but dismissed the idea.

"The compelling arguments that would make us venture into that space weren't there at the time, and they still aren't," said Glenn Hill, manager of information-technology security for Northeastern.

But MIT is still considering such a proposal, according to James Bruce, the university's vice president for information systems. He said MIT is several weeks away from making a decision and would not disclose details.

After dismissing online distribution of music and movies for years, the entertainment industry is increasingly throwing its support behind fee-based services like Apple Computer Inc.'s iTunes Music Store and Movielink, which sells movie downloads.

Music sales have plunged 26 percent in the last three years, said Cary Sherman, president of the Recording Industry Association of America. Some analysts say the sluggish economy and shrinking number of music stores are at least partly at fault, but Sherman places the blame squarely on file-sharing programs like Morpheus and Kazaa.

Although iTunes and other services have started to gain more paying users, getting college students to pay for music when they can download it for free over fast university networks has proven difficult.

"Universities are among the more challenging audiences for pay services because students have more time than money," Sherman said in the conference call with Spanier. "That's why they do so much more downloading than paying."

But at least one industry-backed service is trying to crack the student market. Movielink, which sells 24-hour access to downloads of more than 450 movies from six of the seven major Hollywood studios, today will kick off a marketing campaign that includes ads in college newspapers and banners in university bookstores.

The campaign coincides with upgrades to the Movielink service that allow faster downloads, access to Disney movies like "The Recruit," and the ability to save your place in the movie after your PC reboots. "We haven't marketed to students, so we don't know if they're a lost cause," said Movielink chief executive Jim Ramo. "We don't believe they are."

Chris Gaither can be reached at gaither@globe.com.

© Copyright 2003 Globe Newspaper Company.