• by February 10, 2004

There's a new online campaign designed to educate people on the value of legal music downloading. The "What's The Download" campaign, coordinated by the National Academy of Recording Arts & Sciences (NARAS), is the latest in a series of public awareness efforts on digital music. The Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) and other groups have also come out with education efforts.

NARAS says that the campaign is global in scope and will attempt to reach 650 million viewers. The push, which debuted on Feb. 8 during the Grammy Awards broadcast on CBS, also includes TV and radio advertising. A key part of the drive is the site www.whatsthedownload.com. It's a fairly enticing site packed with some good features-file-swapping data, lists of online music stores and sites, a message board, artists' views on music downloading, among other highlights. A public service TV spot is tagged with the site's URL.

The NARAS resource is a good one but it probably won't staunch illegal file- sharing. I think file-swapping will always appeal to a certain segment of the population that won't pony up for music. I wonder whether the legal sites' that boast better quality downloads and selection, and so forth, are getting their message across. There's not much money being made and yet marketers like Pepsi and Coke are racing to hitch their wagon to the online music future. It's the device makers that are making money-at least for now. It'll be interesting to see how the business model shakes out.