Latest Music Trends For College Students

It started with Napster and it has just progressed from there. In the past college students have been really into downloading as much free music as possible from the Internet. So will this trend continue or will this trend start to dissipate since the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) has started cracking down on college students and other individuals who are illegally downloading music?

It's nothing personal. The Recording Industry Association of America is simply fighting music piracy. And their tactic for doing so is equivalent to the Road Runner getting blown up by dynamite. The first step that the Recording Industry Association of America took was to make a request from all of the Internet service providers to provide a list of all of their subscriber's names that share files. Once they had this hot little list in their hot little hands they started filing lawsuits against everyone that they could find that was involved. Talk about a smack down!

This has been an especially brutal lesson for college students, since this is the group that is the most likely to be in the habit file sharing. After all, they are poor and starving students, right? But has this tactic really worked in stopping college students from illegally obtaining their music choices? Fortunately or unfortunately the lawsuits haven't scared college students too badly because they continue to download music with a thought process that they will never get caught.

And the fact of the matter is that they just may be right. So far the Recording Industry Association of America has only filed lawsuits against 20,000 individuals around the world. And 20,000 out of the millions of people that are illegally downloading music from the Internet, means that the chances are slim that they actually will be caught.

Many students think that they will only be caught is they download a lot of stud from the Internet. And most seem to agree that as long as the costs of CDs continue to rise when they only like one or two of the songs on a CD anyway, they will continue to download the music for free.

The Recording Industry Association of America is not only cracking down on those downloading music online, they are also cracking down on individuals that are trying to sell iPods with music already loaded on it as well. This means that the record industry is scanning auction sites like eBay looking for law-breakers.

And how have students responded to this crack down? They have taken it in stride by continuing to download the music anyway, or by turning to alternative options. Russian sites like www.allofmp3.com offer a wide variety of new albums and various music artists. Since copyright laws are rather loose right now in Russia, it is considered legal to download music from these types of sites.

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