Oregon gets choice of tunes on CDs

EUGENE, Ore. – A Washington state school district was happy to get more than a thousand free compact disks in a settlement with the music industry.

The only problem was, they didn’t get to choose which disks. The result: 1,355 copies of Whitney Houston singing “The Star-Spangled Banner.”

Music retailers donated 115,000 compact disks to the state in a settlement of allegations that the industry had priced CDs too high.

But Oregon won’t have the same problem in handling the national settlement of allegations that the industry had priced CDs too high. Librarians here got the chance to say what they can use, said Kevin Neely, spokesman for state Attorney General Hardy Myers.

Last year’s settlement required defendants Capitol Records, Time Warner, Atlantic Recording, Universal, Sony and others to pay $67 million and donate more than $75 million in CDs across the country.

Some 40,000 Oregonians received checks for $13.86. And last week, more than 67,000 CDs valued at $900,000 were shipped to 300 Oregon libraries and public schools.

In some of the 40 or so states that received CDs in recent months, libraries got CDs that didn’t meet needs or were “absolutely not the kind of music they were interested in,” Neely said.

Schools in Washington’s King and Pierce counties, for example, received 387 CDs with explicit lyrics by the late Puerto Rican rapper, Big Punisher, according to news accounts.

The Eugene Public Library, by contrast, is waiting eagerly for less punishing names such as Frank Sinatra and John Coltrane to add to its 10,000-plus collection, public services manager Rob Everett said.

The library requested certain genres, and Everett expects an eclectic mix of 2,800 CDs in classical, rock, jazz and pop music, valued at $39,000 and due next week.

To reduce duplicate CDs and ensure a fair distribution, the Attorney General’s Office spent weeks developing an allocation and exchange plan with state librarian Jim Scheppke.

Some libraries, however, are still in the dark as to what they’ll receive: Linda Weight of the Siuslaw Public Library District in western Lane County asked for bluegrass, blues and American folk to supplement its 3,000 CDs.