Colleges around the country are beginning to partner up with legal music providers in order to stem the rising tide of law suits issued by the music industry.  It makes sense that college students are among the demographic group most likely to download music, more often than not illegally.  For students, these partnerships are almost always a good thing.  At Penn State University, there has been an agreement with Napster for the past two years at least.  Penn State students are given access to Napster for the entire time they are a student at the university.  Statistics show that these agreements between music downloading companies like Napster are definitely cutting down on the amount that of law suits and letters that are sent to students. 

Let me start off by saying that I love Napster.  It is a great service, and something that I use at least once a day.  The download speeds are unbelievably fast, often approaching 450k.  They have an incredible collection of songs, most of which are free with the subscription.  Napster allows you to play streaming music instead of actually downloading the files as well.  Most of all, Napster has a really easy to use, organized interface that lets you navigate easily through the huge collection of music.  The only downside to Napster is that when you unsubscribe, all the song files that you have downloaded expire and become unusable.  This is especially hard to cope with if have amassed a large library, only to have it expire.  Fortunately, I have found a solution.  By using a program called Tunebyte, you are able to re-record the songs and effectively take the licensing software off, eliminating the need to re-download everything.  Of course, since there is no file sharing involved, you are safe from the law suits.  Napster is certainly worth the $10 a month subscription if you love music, and you fear the record companies.  If you aren’t worried about law suits, go right ahead and keep on using Limewire and Bittorrent. 

Breaking from the perfection of Napster is Ruckus. Ruckus is a service that Penn State has switched to for the upcoming school year.  A cheaper alternative to Napster, Ruckus offers its services to colleges for a much lower price.  The only problem is that it comes at a much lower quality.  The first time I logged onto the Ruckus website, I was horrified by the terrible navigation.  It is fairly difficult to get around the site.  Also, instead of coming with its own browsing program, all navigation must be done through the Ruckus website.  Ruckus forces users to download the music they want to listen to, which often clutters and fills hard drives, since it doesn’t offer streaming music like Napster does.  The songs expire just like Napster’s, but you can’t transfer the music to an IPod or other MP3 player like you can with Napster.  Overall, Ruckus is a step down from Napster.  Ruckus tries to entice us by offering full length movies for download, but you sign up and find out there are only about 10 movies available, all old and nothing too special.  

It’s really too bad that Penn State didn’t leave the choice up to the students.  They didn’t even cut our activity fee which is used to pay for these arrangements.  Instead they are spending that money else where.  I think that most students would agree that we would rather our money be going to Napster, a service that everyone loved.   

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