The music industry needs to clone Ryan Dixon.The Cabrini College senior started downloading free music off the Internet even before Napster put file-sharing on the map way back in 1999. When Napster went down, Dixon graduated to Kazaa.
Now the 21-year-old from Newtown Square, Pa., pays for all his digital songs. Last week, he picked up an EP from the band Maroon5 and a live Jason Mraz track for 99 cents each on iTunes, Apple Computer’s online service. That makes 675 songs he has bought legally since April. He is virtually alone. For every Ryan Dixon, there are thousands of others who prefer getting things for free. They have balked at the high price of CDs, and they don’t want anyone limiting what songs they can own or what they can do with them. They feel they will never get caught.
This is digital music’s “pregnant moment,” said Josh Bernoff, senior analyst for Forrester Research, which tracks technological trends. The music industry, after years of blaming file-sharing for plummeting sales, has struck back, with such big names as Napster, Dell, Sony, America Online, RealNetworks and Musicmatch introducing or planning pay-per-song alternatives. The services are aimed at those who want to spend less and are spooked by copyright-infringement lawsuits.
But will it work? Many industry observers say the new services will provide little lift for the beleaguered record business. In fact, they say, the pay services will only steer more people toward the freebies. More people shared free music files in October than the month before, and more are sharing this year than the year before, said Eric Garland, CEO of BigChampagne.com, which monitors traffic on the largest peer-to-peer networks _ including Kazaa, Morpheus and Grokster _ accounting for about 85 percent of file-sharing.

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