current digital music usage in a college

For about a half decade I have been measuring digital music use (piracy and not) at a few colleges concentrating on a small, high caliber liberal arts school in Ohio. Over the past three weeks I have conducted an email survey along with many followup chats and emails. Here is a high level view.

students are very aware of RIAA anti piracy efforts. There is a feeling that the school would share information with the RIAA.

point to point file sharing programs are fading due to poor availability of external bandwidth, worries about being caught and worries about spyware

the major music companies are viewed with some contempt

100% of those queried agreed with the statement "the majors don't offer music I can identify with"

most students are finding new music by listening to what other students are playing

iTunes and Rendezvous have become important tools in the dorms for music discovery. People can listen to the libraries of others without physically having files on their computers.

portable players like iPods are desirable, but fewer than 20% of students have them. everyone else has a portable cd player

more than 60% of the students use their pc as their primary stereo system. this is up from less than 3% six years ago.

buying used cds is very big (huge compared with past years)

sharing (and presumably ripping) cds is big

borrowing and presumably ripping) cds from the library is big

online music stores are seen as too expensive, too restrictive and too understocked

Napster 2 is seen as a clueless corporate appropriation of a brand

very few campus residents listen to streaming radio stations as external net is flakey

Several students pointed out that buying used cds and reselling them has taken off on campus. Prices have dropped to about $3 for a cd with $2 being a "fair" resale price -- about half what the local used record store gets. This, and the renewed use of library collections, represents a major departure from the network based trend of the past four years.

Rendezvous and iTunes 4 also merit mention. Users on the same subnet can see (if they ask and others allow) the music collections of other people. Some people have developed reputations for having very interesting taste in music and it is common to have a currently played track scrolling on iChat (an instant messenger application). In the evenings, when people return with their laptops, it is common to have fifty to one hundred thousand tracks available with many of these being interesting or unusual. Many students noted that their taste in music is strongly influenced by this service (their words, not mine).

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I have also been following about a dozen students and five faculty members over the same period. To say that the student's consumption behavior has changed would be an understatement - it is very different from what they did as students or from what the current students are doing.