A Victim of File Sharing

A few years ago, Mike's Movies and Music was a fixture in Penn State country,

ALSO SEE: A President Tries to Settle the Controversy Over File Sharing

with four stores around State College (and a fifth in Blacksburg, Va., home of Virginia Tech). The chain had sales approaching $4-million a year.

Today, Mike Negra has only one store that sells music, outside of downtown State College, and it doesn't cater to student tastes. His downtown store typifies his business these days. In a bustling retail district across the street from Penn State's campus, it sits empty and plastered with signs: "Store Closing! All Sales Final!" and "For Lease."

Accounts of the battles over file sharing at colleges often have combatants who include frustrated administrators, petulant students, and litigious recording-industry executives. Mr. Negra says independent record stores like his, common to college towns, are the overlooked casualties of the file-sharing craze.

His stores in State College first felt the impact of file sharing in the fall of 2000. He already knew about Napster then. Earlier that year, sales had begun to drop at his store in Blacksburg, where students were more computer savvy. Now, he says, "kids just do not buy music."

He sold the Blacksburg store at the beginning of 2001 and circled the wagons in State College. He wrote desperate letters to music-industry organizations and tried to talk to his student customers about the importance of copyright, but music sales kept falling. He has lost 70 percent of his business in the past three years. "I went to a [music-retail] convention and found out that I was not the only one," he says. "Dealers on campuses everywhere were getting hit."

The loss of his business has affected others in turn. In 2001, he spent $20,000 for music advertisements in the student newspaper; this year, he spent nothing. As stores close, student employees lose their jobs, he says. And he used to give student organizations thousands of dollars' worth of CD's and promotional materials that could be auctioned off for fund raising, but he feels less charitable now.

"If it's a student organization, I have nothing to do with them," he says. "They are sitting there downloading and destroying the business we made, and then they want something on the flip side. I'm in a rare situation in that I'm in a college town and I could care less about the college students."

Waiting for Lawsuits

To save music retail and send a message, he says, the recording industry should look to its lawyers. "They need to go on every major college campus and sue at least one student, and then publicize the heck out of it."

He's starting to sell appliances and do what he can to survive. He's still renting and selling movies, but he's beginning to see that business drop off, too. Mr. Negra recently downloaded KaZaA to check out the competition. Using a four-year-old laptop and phone line, he pressed a few buttons and got DVD-quality copies of The Hours and Chicago, movies that were not yet out of theaters. He can only imagine what students on campuses can get with newer machines and more-robust Internet connections.

For a man who has watched his business dissolve, he maintains a philosophical demeanor as he sits in his corporate office, which will soon be emptied and sold. A poster of the Beatles pleading "Help!" in semaphore hangs on the wall behind him.

"I don't think that music will go away," says Mr. Negra, who has been in the music business since the 1970s, when he booked concerts at the University of Maryland at College Park. "But the way that artists get their music to users is going to dramatically change, and maybe that's for the better."

Two cartoons that are taped to his office door satirize the technology that is killing his business. One cartoon makes fun of a student who spent $1,700 on a computer so he could get free music. In the other, a Doonesbury strip, the musician Jimmy Thudpucker brags that he is the most-downloaded artist on the Internet -- before glumly adding that he's working at Red Lobster until he finds a business model.

"Those are great," Mr. Negra says. "I'll make copies for you." Moments later, while walking back from the photocopier, he pauses and looks down at the copies in his hand.

"I suppose this is a copyright violation," he says. Then he shrugs and hands over the papers.