Music to students' ears

Rachel and Emily Flynn, 17, are practically addicted to instant messaging and depend on the Web for homework research. And when it comes to music, the Internet is like a giant candy store: Emily got her iPod a year after Rachel, but quickly caught up to her twin's 450 downloaded songs.

Entering their senior year at Taconic High School in Pittsfield, Mass., the twins are aiming to attend Harvard or Williams College but are also looking at other top schools, and take it for granted that, unlike at home, the Internet access wherever they end up will be lightning fast.

They can't wait.

"I know I'll download a lot more at college," Emily said.

"All these places have communal bathrooms," said Rachel. "But in dorm rooms, we need individual ports."

With increasingly tech-savvy music fans like the Flynns entering college, some schools are starting to respond by offering digital entertainment services. Last month, Yale University announced a pilot program that will let students download more than 700,000 songs legally for about $2 per month. A handful of other schools are testing the waters with similar deals.

"Even two years ago, I would have said `no' if you asked if Yale expected to be in this business," said Chuck Powell, the school's chief of educational technology. "My guess is we'll see more schools offering this kind of service this year and even more in 2005."

College students have been ferocious downloaders of music for years. When networks began to get clogged by the huge files, and the music industry began suing individual users for trading songs without permission, many schools increased enforcement of their honor codes and upped the frequency of warnings, hoping not only to stop illegal activity but also to keep their networks open for education and research.

Now some are starting to take another approach: Give students a better, and legal, service.

First was Penn State, which in November announced an 18-month experiment with Napster to offer 15,000 students free, unlimited, legal access to more than 500,000 songs, plus videos and other entertainment. The university picks up the tab for "tethered downloads," a form of long-term music rental. Students pay 99 cents per song to burn favorites onto a CD or download them to a MP3 digital music player.

Yale signed a deal, on a trial basis, with a Colorado company called Cflix.

Cflix founder and president Brett Goldberg, a 1999 graduate of Duke, also has a contract with his alma mater to offer on-demand movies and cable programs in residence halls. Goldberg says Cflix is negotiating "15 or 20" additional music service contracts.

For some colleges, offering a legal alternative helps avoid liability. Others are looking at it as a tool for teaching ethics and the law. Others see a way to help cash-strapped students save money. Internet entertainment also could become the latest enticement in admissions marketing.

Though the current focus is on music, many say movies are next. One feature-length film exceeds Penn State's 1.5 gigabyte weekly limit on network traffic per student. A special server would minimize disruption.

A University of Rochester experiment has made Napster available on campus since March 15; one third of 3,700 eligible students registered for the service. This fall, Bentley College plans to pilot a service in a residence hall for juniors with another company. Wake Forest University will add a library of 700,000 songs to a subscription-based pilot that began last year.

Not every college is jumping on the bandwagon. At the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, spokesman Patrick Callahan said, "We do not now and do not intend to offer such a service."

Nor does Boston College. "We're not an arm of the entertainment industry," said Marian Moore, vice president for information technology.

Some new ideas have failed. Last fall, two entrepreneurial MIT students announced and then voluntarily suspended a service they designed. LAMP, the Library Access to Music Project, made a free archive of music available to students on campus, only to discover that the company supplying the music had falsely represented itself as fully licensed.

At Bentley College, officials are taking a wait-and-see stance. A study in April by Bentley faculty and student researchers found that nine out of 10 college-bound high school seniors confessed to illegally downloading music during the previous six months. Many said they are less concerned about the ethical and legal issues involved, including intellectual property rights, than they are about music selection, download speed, spam, and computer viruses. But the study also found that if a fast, legal alternative was available, 90 percent of those surveyed said they would be very interested.

Bentley's vice president for technology, Traci Logan, helped design an undergraduate marketing course that examined student behavior and attitudes along with business challenges facing Ruckus Network, a Boston area start-up competing with such established names as RealNetwork, CNET, and Movielink, as well as the new legal Napster.

"Our objective is purely educational. The results were fascinating," said Logan. Participants realized their own behavior changed after learning about pricing, royalties, and how many people it takes to produce a CD.

At Penn State, the program so far has been a hit.

"Before we announced the pilot, students found it themselves and collectively began streaming 100,000 songs a day," said Bill Mahon, assistant vice president for university relations. "Our student newspaper has condemned it from the start," said Mahon. "Apparently they still think file-sharing should be free. But I've heard from at least 50 other college newspapers that want their institutions to begin a program, too."