University of Michigan students will soon be able to legally download music, but MSU officials say any similar ideas are in preliminary stages.

U-M students can download music for $2.99 per month or 89 cents per song as part of Cdigix, a new program the university is using.

Part of the program also will allow professors to upload videos to a program where students can watch them anytime.

John Williams, U-M's executive producer of Digital Media Commons, said there has been confusion about the program, which only works for Microsoft Windows programs.

He said U-M is using the program to allow professors to share their videos with students, and the music downloading was just part of that deal, not the reason they bought it.

"Cdigix offered to sell it to us for a very low price, and they wanted to have the opportunity to offer the video and music services," Williams said. "It was a reasonable trade-off."

Williams said the university's agreement with Cdigix won't allow them to reveal how much they paid for the program, but the program will be up and running at the end of November.

MSU Vice Provost for Libraries, Computing and Technology David Gift said MSU officials have been talking about bringing a music downloading program to MSU, but haven't made a formal decision.

"We've had very preliminary discussions with a couple of vendors, but we are not at the point of involving students in the selection process yet," Gift said.

Gift said he has had conversations with students who told him if a music downloading program was introduced at MSU, it should be something students would pay for separately.

"It would probably be an amenity service that's built into housing rates, it would depend on finding a vendor that's willing to offer individual sales," Gift said.

"One model has us looking at whether we could basically use the size of Michigan State where students would pay directly."

He also said Cdigix wouldn't stop all students from downloading music illegally, because it only works for Microsoft Windows programs.

Illegal downloading has been an issue at MSU, where nine students last spring and as many as four this fall have been sued by the Recording Industry Association of America.

MSU social work junior Shamah Stark said she would like a music downloading system through MSU because she doesn't like buying CDs for only a couple of songs.

"I stopped downloading because I was afraid of getting caught and I would like MSU to do something like that," Stark said. "With so many people here, you think they could get a discount."

Other students, however, said they don't think that Cdigix would be widely used by students, including U-M sophomore Kristal Kilgore.

Kilgore said the program wouldn't help end illegal music downloading.

"I can download music for free through other programs, so I don't know how many people will actually pay when they can still get it for free," she said.

Even though music downloading at MSU would mean more stress on the campus network, Doug Nelson, network community manager for Academic Computing and Network Services at MSU, said he believed the university's network could handle the students' downloads.

"I don't think it would be a significant problem, we try to engineer the network so we could accommodate any kind of video and audio downloading," he said.

Rebecca McNulty can be reached at mcnult13@msu.edu.