Purdue University in West Lafayette, Indiana, has come up with a free music download program for its students that will be in place very soon if it is not already. Did I forget to mention that this plan is legal? Very important point. The University has teamed up with Ctrax, which is the music division of the Denver based company known as Cdigix to make the plan work. Cdigix offers not only music but movies, television programs, sports films etc., to students at various colleges and universities. Their primary mission is to "offer college students compelling content that they can enjoy and frequently access." It is made up of four different service components including Cflix (entertainment VoD), Ctrax (digital music), Clabs (educational media) and the Cvillage (campus showcase service). The material offered through Cdigix is of a very high quality that is delivered locally on-campus to the various computers in the residence halls.
Sound too good to be true? Well, the students do have to pay a small fee (.89 cents) to burn the downloaded song onto a cd or to transfer the music file to another site. The fee is to cover copyright priveleges and is the same for off campus students and faculty and staff although they must pay an additional monthly fee of 2.99 and 5.99 respectively.
Cdigix was chosen over Napster as the University felt that Cdigix was more geared towards university and college students in addition to the fact that they provided the infrastructure to set up the system. Cdigix offers access to over one million songs which isn't too shabby. Some students have made the point that despite the low price for the music, the option to download the same song for free at minimal risk will still seem the better option.
This is an idea that could catch on and spread like wildfire across the country if the University of Purdue sees positive results. I think it could be a compromise that everyone would feel comfortable with at this point. Despite the fact that .89 cents is .89 cents more than free, people might be willing to pay for it if for no other reason than to ease their slightly guilty conscience. The music industry, if they were smart, would agree to this because this just might be as good as it gets for them. This might be something that the University of San Diego should consider putting into place....
I think this is a great idea. But not without reservations. For the on campus students, since the fee is paid by the residence halls, I assume every student is subsidizing the service equally through their tuition and/or boarding fees, even if they don't download any music or few songs? And supposing it does become very popular, as it just might, because it is completely legal, wouldn't the school's bandwidth be bogged down by all the [legal] downloads?
For the off campus students, why would they pay for this particular service, because it will cost $3/month + $0.89/song. It would be cheaper through, say, Realnetworks, which I think is only $0.79/song. I can see, however, the potential for such a service to really reduce the illegal downloading significantly.
Posted by: Cuong Nguyen | October 10, 2004 at 02:14 AM
I too think this is a good idea, with good potential for stepping up legal downloads and curbing illegal ones.
I just wanted to make a quick comment regarding the first comment made to this post. A great incentive for the off campus student to pay the subscription fee of 3 dollars a month is because they would have access to unlimited free downloads so long as they not burn or transfer the file. They would be granted the capability of trying out all the music offered by the service for free. This allows the student to decide whether or not the song is actually worth .89 cents. With Realnetworks you have to pay for the song up front and are then stuck with bill whether you enjoy the music or not. Or you may subscribe to RealRhapsody, which works much the same as cdigix subscription service does, however it costs 10 dollars a month.
Posted by: Robert "Jake" Shafer | October 10, 2004 at 07:58 AM
I found this doing a search for people having problems with Cdigix's DRM, so forgive a comment on an old post. I am a Purdue student and while the selection Cdigix offers is rather nice, some people complain that it's only 128 kbps WMA. I've done a fair amount of listening by now and I have no real complaints with quality. Their DRM, however, is horrible. The licenses almost invariably time out after about two weeks, requiring you to, as far as i've been able to find, re-download the song. According to the company this is not supposed to happen and the songs should be good for the duration of your subscription. Their suggestions of signing into the service before playing to refresh licenses is no good. I suspect it is a problem on their end, either in the license encoding or server maintenance.
-A Purdue Student
Posted by: Sean | December 20, 2004 at 11:29 PM