Universities are considering ways to bring legal Internet jukeboxes to dorm rooms, including entering deals with commercial service providers that would see online music charges included alongside tuition fees or picked up by the schools themselves.
The effort is proceeding on several fronts, the most advanced charge being led by a committee of university and entertainment industry officials that is now collecting information from music services on behalf of individual colleges. Pilot projects could start as early as this fall, but insiders say that next year is more likely.
Recording industry officials and music services see the drive as a promising way to entice students away from free download services as well as a way to create a new, potentially significant source of income for the music industry and its nascent online efforts.
“We think it’s very important that students are offered a legitimate alternative” to file-trading networks, said Cary Sherman, president of the Recording Industry Association of America. “We are hopeful that some music services and some universities will do some pilot projects, so they can gain some understanding of how that market might work.”
The tentative contacts between the universities, entertainment companies and the online music distribution services could be the first in a series of steps that hold the possibility of transforming listening and consumption patterns as much as Napster once did.
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