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.

No thank you

[mrxak]

They have CTrax at my school. It's horrible. Everyone has an iPod and uses iTMS or gets their music illegally on the school's DC++ hub. Nobody really seems to know why we have CTrax.

About as bad as DRM gets

[JackStrife17]

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.

Re:TNSTAAFL

[garcia]

I don't think they do this anymore, but allofmp3.com used to allow logged in users to stream any album in some crappy quality. At work it sure beat any of the alternatives...

I don't like keeping a large music collection at work and I don't want to carry my media player there either so I have recently been using Pandora [pandora.com] to stream music that I actually like to my work machine. It's not the best solution but it's better than the alternatives (i.e. streaming ABC/Disney stations) :(

An RPI Student's View...

[PipianJ]

Some people may remember RPI [rpi.edu] 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 [ruckusnetwork.com]. 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 [rpi.edu] 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 [rpi.edu], and Ruckus is, of course, none of these, supporting only Microsoft DRM.

Despite some quiet rancor [rpi.edu] about the deal, and its possible relationship to a 'blackmail' deal with the RIAA, the student council twisted the facts [rpi.edu] and approved Ruckus anyway [rpi.edu], intending to keep it through the 06-07 year [rpi.edu], despite some [rpi.edu] qualms [rpi.edu] 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.

Napster is perfect for me

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

DRM workaround for cheapskates....

[iamcf13]

Worse, the free (gratis) part is an expiring, "tethered" collection of music for those who use it; downloads to keep are fee-per-track.

DRM workaround for cheapskates....

2 PC's

2 sound cards with digital I/O such as the (currently unavailable [for good?]) Catalina soundcards from Turtle Beach

http://www.turtlebeach.com/site/products/soundcard s/catalina/producthome.asp [turtlebeach.com]

Enjoy! (Did RIAA 'lean' on Turtle Beach to 'pull' these sound cards from the market?...)

P.S.: This is the best, simplest, straightforward, 'secure', method to strip DRM from digital audio files with 100% fidelity to the original file. Right up there with the Windows 'shift key' trick to avoid pwning your PC with a DRM/anticopy encumbered audio CD before you play/rip it.... :) If your PC and soundcard are fast enough, you might be able to get away with 1 PC, 1 Digital I/O soundcard, and a digital 'loopback cable' (if such a thing exists or can be created) to connect the digital I/O ports together on the soundcard when stripping DRM from digital audio files.

P.P.S: If you are going to buy digital audio media online, buy lossless DRM-free CD quality audio media (i.e. .WAV files) and burn your own CDs if you so choose -- everything else out there is essentially 'radio quality' and is basically 'promotional material' that should have a pricetag of $0.00

twisted terminology

[bzipitidoo]

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.

Re:No thank you

[plague3106]

Ahh if only we could go back to the good old days.

When we first started 'file sharing' in college (1996 / 1997), we would get our mp3s from other college kids public FTP server. Found a lot of bands I'd never have overwise heard that way.

Re:Even crap isn't worth free

[TheRaven64]

This is most interesting in its potential use in future file sharing cases. It is difficult to assign value to something like a track of music, but a good measure is 'whatever someone is willing to pay.' If the RIAA is trying to give their wares away for free, and people still don't want them, then this means that their value is zero.

Now, when the RIAA says 'this person stole $3000 worth of music' a good defence lawyer could argue 'my client copied $0 worth of material.' Of course, if someone pirated it, then it must have a value slightly greater than $0 to them. Finding out what this value really is would be interesting though (and something the record labels would do well to invest in discovering, since their future depends on it).

Re:Even crap isn't worth free

[harks]

When my college sent emails out asking who would use this, I asked the student president who sent the email how much it would cost the school. He told me it would not cost the school one cent, it would all be paid through advertising.

you don't get to define the English language.

[YesIAmAScript]

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0312013493/104-85 97344-0175904?v=glance&n=283155 [amazon.com]

The use of stealing to mean copying information predates your existence on this planet. It was in use in the 50s. Stop trying to pretend it is others trying to redefine the language.

Did you moan about the identity theft article on slashdot last week?

http://it.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/07/04/237 218 [slashdot.org]

Re:Even crap isn't worth free

[Van Cutter Romney]

The best things in life are free!

I'm from another country where until recently you couldn't get music from the Golden Age [60s - 80s]. So file swapping was pretty common - really common! Most of my music collection is from my college years and there's no way anybody is going to take it away from me.... And all the music that I bought from stores while "experimenting" turned out to be crap!