Why College Kids Are Turning Down Free (Legal) Music

Going to college this fall? Napster might be free. Not the old Napster—the one where you could download all the music you wanted and keep it forever. That was free already.

No, this is the new Napster. The commercial Napster that lets you play any song up to three times for free, after which you have to subscribe to Napster and buy the track. (You can also buy unlimited access for $9.95 a month and keep all the songs you download for as long as you keep paying for the service.)

But you, if you're a college student at one of about 120 U.S. institutions of higher learning, can get the unlimited access for nothing at all (the link is just an example of an offer at University of Miami). Download all you want. There's only one catch: It's only free while you're in school.

And it's that catch that is keeping college kids from signing up. The Wall Street Journal is reporting on this odd phenomenon [PDF link], which notes rightly that getting college students to turn down something free takes some doing. But college kids aren't saps: They know there's no such thing as really "free." Here, the gambit is simple: Napster is giving away the service because it wants to "hook" you for the long term. It figures that you'll have amassed so much music after four years that you'll have no choice but to keep paying for it.

What would you do? It's hard to blame the kids for shying away from Napster, even at no cost. The restrictions are just too heavy. The WSJ makes the case against Napster (and, of course, for arch-enemy iTunes) far more eloquently than I have the space to do here, but it's definitely worth a look. Whether you have a child going to school in the fall or you're headed there yourself, give the story a spin and see what you might be getting into.