Colleges may soon be required to "provide students with commercial music downloading services and implement traffic filtering technologies in order to deter peer-to-peer filesharing."

Why is the RIAA targeting college students? Because "their appreciation for intellectual property has not yet reached its full development." Read the full interview with Cara Duckworth, spokeswoman for the RIAA, here.

According to Nielsen Soundscan reports, the digital downloading industry as a whole is steadily declining.

MTV is set to try to get its share of the digital-music pie, with the roll-out of a new online music retailer set for tomorrow (May 17). The download service, Urge, will put the MTV brand into the multimillion download industry, and will feature exclusive tracks culled from bands’ appearances on upcoming TRL and Unplugged episodes. To give it a push, MTV partnered with Microsoft to integrate the music store into upcoming upgrades of Windows Media Player similar to the retail/player integration in iTunes.

Urge faces an uphill battle. It enters a field dominated by Apple’s iTunes, which boasts a market share of 70 percent of the downloadable-music market through last year, according to...

One of our forum users, Kevin, is a student at CSU-Sacramento who's currently working on a Marketing Research project conerning music downloading. He's created s survey and was hoping some of you could fill it out-- survey. It's secure and anonymous, so there's not anything to worry about. It's not a "scientific" study by any means. Kevin just thought it would be fun to get an idea of what the AP.net's visitors think about downloading music, and at the same time do something productive for his class.

I have posted the file sharing / downloading panel I conducted a little while back right here. Responders include Peter Wentz of Fall Out Boy, Leo Ferrante of Interscope/Geffen/A&M, Ian Harrison of Hopeless Records, Krystal Schwegel of Moxie Star, Kelly of AOL Music, Brendan of Atticus Clothing, and J'Net Nguyen of TheMusicEdge.com. I hope you enjoy it, and I encourage you to discuss what the responders had to say either in the replies of the interview or this here thread.

According to this article written by BBC, even global court actions have had no effect on reducing downloading music.