Higher Education's Napster Moment

What Higher Ed Can Learn from the Music Industry's Worst Decade

The second part of a two-part series about education and AI. The other essay celebrates the futureproof power of the art studio model. This one diagnoses the problem by comparing the current moment with academia and AI to the music industry and the internet in the early aughts.

“Napster hijaceked our music without asking. They never sought our permission. Our catalog of music simply became available for free downloads on the Napster system...If music is free for downloading, the music industry is not viable.” - Lars Ulrich, drummer of Metallica to Congress, 2000

Lately, I’ve noticed a lot of parallels between the “old” music industry of the 20th century and the modern American university. They both were originally prized American institutions that protected and promoted creative people. Over time, they became top-heavy and lost some public trust. Today, higher education faces many challenges including ceaseless political pressures and declining enrollment. These alone are troubling. But in the long term, it may be changes in technology that could be most impactful.

I lived through the collapse of the music industry in the early aughts. Just as my rock band July For Kings had secured a rare major label recording contract, the music industry itself had begun to collapse. People used to say “getting a record deal is like catching a unicorn”. Well, I did catch one and rode it basically straight into the sun.

It happened fast. By the time my band’s album was released MCA Records — former home of Jimmy Hendrix and many other Icons — hardly existed. Then, shortly the release MCA collapsed and merged with Geffen. Ultimately, MCA’s catalogue was purchased by Universal Music Group. Suddenly I didn’t know a single person involved in the business of owning or administering the music I had written in my bedroom.

Today, a popular narrative is that Napster, Mp3’s and CD burning killed the music industry. This is half true. What really happened is that the music industry’s own response to emerging technologies and changing consumer preferences killed the music industry, or at least finished the job.

Digital technologies represented a profound opportunity for musicians and the industry alike. It seems that everyone — except record labels and Metallica — met the moment with excitement about possibilities. But faced with music piracy, rather than embracing and adapting, the industry began suing the most passionate music fans: kids at home on their computers using Naptser. Metallica’s 2000 lawsuit against Napster became the defining image of an industry long thought to be hostile to its own audience. Then as now this struck many people as ludicrous and even offensive — the music industry attacking the most enthusiastic music collectors. This had the effect of further radicalizing consumers and artists alike against the industry. Suddenly, downloading music from Napster and burning CD’s was no longer just the most convenient way to enjoy and share your favorite songs — it was also a political statement akin to flashing a big middle finger at fatcat label CEO’s. So that’s what people did.

The eventual outcome was a near total devaluation of recorded music that continues today. Whereas access to a song or album used to cost $20 to purchase a compact disc, today Spotify and other streaming platforms pay just as small fraction of pennies per day to artists for streams (listens). Music is now more accessible than ever, and essentially worthless (fractions of pennies) in economic terms: all the recorded music in history at your fingertips permanently for just a few bucks a month. Musicians continue to try and adapt.

Now I am an art professor. Once again I find myself connected to a large institution attempting to navigate profound technological change.

Students today are entering their freshman year in college having had access to generative AI for about four years—the entirety of their high school experience. Like many of their professors, they’ve learned to integrate AI into their daily lives. And it’s hard to blame students for wanting to use AI. A cynical take on education is that students are essentially “text generators”. Like music consumers deeply dedicated to finding the music they love, today’s students seek answers. And then, students attempt to “generate” text responses that fulfill the requirements of their professors’ assignments. Most of the work of college really is producing text: short answers, comparative essays — things that frankly, generative AI does better than most college students already.

This is an old argument, the idea that school is mostly regurgitating things from your instructor. But it’s a popular argument and perhaps increasingly salient. Like new technologies tend to do, AI doesn’t just present a challenge — it solidifies, illuminates and accelerates existing challenges. AI puts into sharper focus the shortcomings with how we’ve been educating for decades.

While the ethics of AI use is contested (and among artists still remains somewhat uncool), its usefulness is essentially undeniable. Students now have AI tutors and research partners available 24/7 to break down concepts in ways they can understand, and are available to help cram at 3am before the night of an exam. The consumer attraction to AI is, like downloading music in the aughts, impossible to stop.

For a time many universities responded to AI in familiar fashion: deploying surveillance and detection tools to catch students using AI, even in instances where students were engaged in authentic learning. Universities, through Canvas software and other “Learning Management Systems” have essentially already created a digital panopticon where students are under surveillance 24/7. AI detection software seemsed a natural extension of this mode. The arms race that followed was patently absurd — students writing essays using AI, professors feeding those essays into AI systems to determine whether AI wrote them, and innocent students getting caught in the crossfire of false positives. Savvy students even began intentionally including typos to make their AI-generated work appear more human.

For now, that phase appears to be over. Many universities, including my own, have quietly stopped using AI detection platforms. This is the iTunes moment: a grudging acknowledgement that the landscape has shifted, and a capitulation to large tech platforms. Yet, this doesn’t resolve the deeper questions or the coming, potentially deeper disruptions. Like iTunes and the iPad were for the music industry, this may simply be kicking the can down the road.

The underlying challenge remains. If a student can hire an AI agent that "logs into Canvas every day, watches lectures, reads essays, writes papers, participates in discussions, and submits your homework — automatically," what exactly are universities selling? An ever-escalating arms race between student AI and institutional AI is as dumb as the music industry suing music listeners. At precisely the time when trust in universities has eroded and when faculty and student morale has cratered under political pressure and proliferating federal compliance demands, continuing to police AI use accelerates decline rather than reversing it.

Let’s get back to Metallica (cue the music: “Unforgiven”). Metallica had one thing right: music has value. They articulated that value clearly and passionately even as young music fans dismissed them as out of touch. Where they went wrong was in taking antagonistic stance against their own listeners and music fans, suing the very people who loved their music most. Universities have already made the same mistake, wielding their historical policing powers against plagiarism while failing to acknowledge the inevitability of shifts in how learning happens.

But simply articulating value isn’t enough. Metallica and the music industry failed to pivot creatively and develop new ways of delivering music that embraced digital technology while preserving the economic value of albums and songs. They clung desperately to a model already toppling under its own weight. Higher education is now at the same crossroads.

There will always be a need for arts, philosophy, science, and education itself. The work happening on campuses is valuable and should be preserved. But universities must now demonstrate that value through transformation — not through litigation and enforced stagnation. Universities can either become genuinely valuable to students by reimagining how education works in an AI age, or they may find themselves becoming as irrelevant as the compact disc (okay, I still do have a few!) .

Education must be built around embodied, collaborative, human-centered learning that AI genuinely cannot replicate. The good news is that a model for how meaningful education can be delivered in the age of AI already exists at universities: the art studio.