The “Nittany Napster” Model

Click here to receive your FREE subscription to Campus Technology

Home > The “Nittany Napster” Model

Current News

The “Nittany Napster” Model

11/12/2003

By Terry Calhoun

Are we at a “tipping point,” or just a smooth place in the road?

At first glance, the Penn State/Napster deal, which gives premium Napster music service to all Penn State students, is a win-win for all parties. Penn State gets relief from the RIAA, a nice service for its students, possibly some reduction in staffing costs relating to illegal Peer-to-Peer issues, and some great PR, including praise from the House and Senate. Napster gets great PR and something that was missing in its newly-hatched head-to-head fight with iPod: a built-in constituency that naturally tends to use Napster services. Plus, the students get what they're going to make sure they get anyway...lots of music.

But this is not a precursor of the much-anticipated transformation of the music industry, nor will the deal be without its own issues and problems.

I remember back in the early days of Napster when our work-study students would come to us and complain that their desktop machines didn't work and we would discover that the hard drives were absolutely, completely choked with music files. It took forever to figure out what they were doing and we never did figure out how to stop them completely. Storage space is not the issue now, of course; bandwidth and intellectual property are the major concerns.

Some institutions, like the University of Florida, are coping with the intellectual property issues of file trading by designing programs, like Icarus, that shut it down. Most are working on educational programs to make better intellectual property citizens of students, but are running right up against a generational divide. Penn State, whose president Graham Spanier is co-chair of the Joint Committee of the Higher Education and Entertainment Communities Technology Task Force, is taking another tack. And it's one that again puts Penn State in the innovative role, much like it was five years ago when it launched the Student Newspaper Readership Program that is now embraced by the New York Times and USA Today and is on hundreds of campuses.

Beginning with the next semester, students in Penn State residence halls are going to have complimentary subscriptions to Napster's premium service. Penn State is providing its students with what Rep. Lamar Smith (R-Texas) calls a "legal online music marketplace...that compensates artists and offers listeners high-quality music." Leaving aside how well the current model compensates artists, as opposed to music companies, it appears that Penn State understands that what we middle-aged Americans think of as a "want" is actually a "need" for the young people on campus.

Some of the students are already complaining of course, that it's not really "free," since the cost is paid from their technology fees. But Spanier is a very smart guy, and those fees are not going up. No doubt Penn State can afford this because there are some overall IT-related savings from having fewer legal concerns and the near-certainty that the RIAA will leave Penn State alone for a while.

And the complaining students who already have iPod or use Macintosh computers, or who use older versions of Windows, are just reflecting the continuing hardware/software compatibility war, in which this is a battle where Napster takes some significant ground. Last week iPod users downloaded something like 1.5 million tunes while Napster users downloaded only 300,000. A week or two after the new semester, Penn State students alone will be helping Napster to turn that tide a bit.