Cdigix, a free music downloading service offered by the university as part of its “Get Legal” campaign, is canceling its services beginning April 30, according to Cdigix representatives.
Mark Brodsky, vice president of university sales at Cdigix, said they are canceling the service because the company wants to focus on products that support core university needs, such as their classroom downloading service, and also because of bigger challenges in the music downloading industry.
Cdigix offers unlimited free music downloading for students at participating universities, of which UCLA is one. It also runs Ctrax, a program in conjunction with iTunes that donates five cents of every sale to the university’s student government.
Marwa Kaisey, president of the Undergraduate Students Association Council, said the downloaded music has not generated much revenue for USAC.
“Not to the point where we’d be drastically affected if the program was cut,” she said.
Jonathan Curtiss, technological development manager for Student and Campus Affairs, said the university found out Friday that Cdigix is discontinuing its services and added that UCLA has begun examining other possibilities for free downloading with other University of California campuses.
Curtiss said UCLA, in conjunction with the “UC Legal to Share” consortium, is looking for an alternative option for students looking to download music legally, and that the student demand for free downloading service was high.
“UCLA had the highest number of (Cdigix) downloads out of the UCs,” he said.
Brodsky said UCLA had an average demand for free downloads, but that overall the program did not do as well as the company had anticipated.
“The demand … was a lot lower than a lot of us had hoped,” he said.
Last year, UCLA launched its “Get Legal” program, designed to encourage students to download music legally, and Curtiss said he hoped Cdigix’s discontinuance would not affect that campaign.
“We’re working to find an alternative. I hope the impact is little to none,” he said.
“Get Legal” employs three vendors to cover “all the basics” for students, Curtiss said. Apple iTunes, MindDawn and, until now, Cdigix, covered all sorts of users at UCLA, he said.
Mark Adato, a former Cdigix campus marketing manager, said the program had not been very successful.
“Relative to the entire UCLA population, we still had a long way to go,” he said of Cdigix’s advertising and promotion campaigns.
One of the problems with the service, Brodsky said, was that the downloads were not compatible with iPods.
Adato said he thinks that unless students find an another free source, they will turn to illegal downloading.
“They’ll probably fall back to pirating (music) as 90 percent of the population does,” he said.
Brodsky said Cdigix is switching its focus to Clabs, a video downloading program for library reserves.
“It would absolutely benefit UCLA; there are schools similar to UCLA already using it,” he said.
Curtiss said he did not know if UCLA would take advantage of the Clabs service yet.
Adato said he believes a replacement free-download program would be a smart thing for the “Get Legal” group to pursue.
“It would be to their advantage to find another option,” he said.