Raquel Hernandez doesn't really care that Napster, the name that first put the fear of the Internet into the music industry, is being reborn today as an online music store.

The 17-year-old college student took a break from her Billie Holliday CD -- a CD she bought, by the way -- to tell why. She and her friends do buy some CDs, if they like the artist enough. But half still download illegally from Kazaa and other free services; she's never heard of any of them paying for music downloads.

"They know they should stop, but they can't," Hernandez said. "It's like an addiction."

From the sound of things, Hernandez speaks for a lot of college students at San Jose State University, who greeted the news of Napster's return -- it's now called Napster 2.0 -- with a collective shrug.

They remember the name, but in the same way they remember their high school prom; it was fun while it lasted, but they're not itching to go back. They've moved on.

Napster's return, to be announced today in a splashy New York event, comes as the recording industry is beginning to offer legitimate buying options to a public determined to download songs one at a time, rather than buy a whole CD. Until Apple Computer launched its iTunes Music Store earlier this year, the industry was mostly using lawsuits to try to stop people from downloading music over the Internet.

After Apple's early success, however -- it sold 10 million songs in just over four months -- the entire online music industry has followed its lead, with BuyMusic, MusicMatch, RealNetworks, Dell and others announcing that they will offer music downloads. Despite the excitement now, these paid download services are likely to have a hard time cracking the college-student market, who were among the first to jump on the free-music bandwagon.

Milton Olin, former chief operating officer of Napster -- the first Napster -- said that because of this some in the recording industry are interested in selling a service to colleges. Students would pay a subscription as part of their fees, and have access to all the music they want.

"The problem is to get people to accept the first price point," Olin said. "The industry keeps struggling to find the sweet spot between adoption and the fact that people are still used to being able to get things for free."

Napster 2.0, which is related to the old Napster in name only, will charge 99 cents for each song download, or $9.95 a month to leave an unlimited number of songs on the hard drives of up to three computers. It's owned by Roxio, the Santa Clara CD-burning software maker that bought the Napster name at bankruptcy auction for $5 million and tagged it on the pressplay music service it purchased from Sony and Universal for $39.5 million in cash and stock. Sony and Universal still have a stake in Napster 2.0.

Napster is expected to offer 500,000 songs, which is more than any competitor -- but it's not clear whether all of the songs will burn to CDs, or transfer to portable music players.

"The whole idea of using Napster and Kazaa is because it's free, right?" said Steve Bui, 24. He pointed out that college students are famously broke. "First they need a job. It's still a dollar a song, which is relatively cheap -- but for a single song, I don't know."

As early as 1998, a year before the original Napster took hold, geeks across the country were finding each other on Internet Relay Chat (IRC) and using their campus networks to DJ digital dorm parties, downloading songs from thousands of miles away. When Napster arrived, it became an overnight hit on college campuses, where rule bending is part of the culture, and fast Internet connections are as plentiful as power sockets.

Perhaps because of the culture and the challenge, hard-core college file swappers are soldiering on. Chris Davis, an 18-year-old student, was wary of talking openly about file swapping. But after some coaxing, he admitted that his brother has downloaded about 2,000 songs, and movies from IRC, where it can be easier to hide. He also said students trade music and movies from inside the university network.

Sitting next to him outside the Martin Luther King Jr. library Wednesday, 18-year-old Chris Stewart said he has used Limewire a couple of times and has considered trying Apple's iTunes Music Store.

Catie Cranford, 19, wasn't impressed with the news of Napster's return. "I don't know anybody who uses a paid download service," she said, though she estimates 85 percent of her friends download from Kazaa and others.

To elude the record companies looking for song-swappers, she said they avoid sharing the music they have downloaded. They all buy CDs, too, she said, but only the ones they really like.

"If I just want one song and the rest of the CD sucks, I don't want to have to buy the whole CD," she said. But what about paid download sites? Too much hassle, she said. "Easier to just go back to the old way of waiting till your friend buys it."

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