More Bad News For Downloading Foes: College Students Won’t Pay For Music Any Price

There was much hopefulness in the "stop illegal downloading" camp when Napster, Ruckus and others started blanket licensing college campuses as an alternative to unlicensed P2P’s, but it appears any excitement was premature.

"College students continue to download music illegally, even when their universities provide campus-wide access to (free legal) digital music services…", according to Red Herring reporting from last week’s Digital Music Forum in NYC.

"…StreamCast Networks, which runs the peer-to-peer service Morpheus, a frequent RIAA target…polled students about how much they would be willing to pay for music and found an unwillingness to pay at all…We finally came to the conclusion that there is a cultural cost of paying for music…it doesn’t matter if it’s $0.20. There’s a cultural cost, just as there’s a cultural cost of giving up your credit card or going into an environment where you might be the only one on the dance floor."

"…colleges aren’t able to control illegal downloading by blocking certain sites. Much of the file trading occurs when students put two iPods together, or when they email or instant message files to  each other."

Older buyers do seem to be adopting the legal downloading habit,  but they weren’t the ones trading illegally anyway.  Additionally any migration to single song downloads from purchasing physical CD’s will probably mean less revenue for labels and artists as consumers cherry pick favorite songs for 99 cents each over more expensive full "album" purchases. 

There is no easy answer, but the continued focus on litigation and the lack of experimentation by labels, publishers and even download services in search of new workable paradigms can only mean more quarters of lost revenue and opportunity.  Why not try variable pricing or downloaded singles at 99 cents (or even more), but a dull album for $5?  Why not add more content – lyrics, artwork, video, etc – to make the CD or full album download seem like the bargain that $10-20 DVD’s appear to be?  Try something…anything…before it’s too late.