Free money: It's the stuff college students' dreams are made of.

Free money from buying music: It's not just a dream anymore.

Any American citizen who bought prerecorded music between Jan. 1, 1995, and Dec. 22, 2000, is eligible to receive up to $20 as part of the proposed settlement of the Compact Disc Minimum Advertised Price antitrust lawsuit.

"Distributors set a minimum price for compact discs to be advertised, and if you did not comply ... advertising dollars would get eliminated," said attorney Steven Steingard of Kohn, Swift & Graf, a counsel for the plaintiff class in the lawsuit. "All it took was one store in a chain to violate [this policy] for the entire chain to be penalized, which dragged prices up."

While stores that sold other products in addition to music were able to advertise low prices because they were not dependent upon the advertising money from distributors, music stores could not avoid high prices without losing money, Steingard said.

"Regular stores complained they were unable to compete," Steingard said.

The policy of raising prices involved a number of music companies, including Bertelsmann Music Group, EMI Music Distribution, Sony Music Entertainment, Universal Music and Warner-Elektra-Atlantic. Tower Records, Musicland Stores and Trans World Entertainment are also defendants in the lawsuit.

In May 2000, the Federal Trade Commission required the music distributors and retailers to stop using minimum advertised price policies. Soon after, class action lawsuits were brought to court, and the attorney generals of 43 states charged that the companies violated antitrust laws, Steingard said.

"We were most involved in the litigation phase of the lawsuit ... and did a lot of working with economists," said James Donahue, Pennsylvania's chief deputy attorney general.

In October 2002, the plaintiffs and defendants reached a proposed settlement that said the defendants would pay $64.3 million in cash and $75.7 million in music CDs.

The cash will be divided among those who file claims at www.musiccdsettlement.com by March 3, as long as the number of people does not cause the award to be larger than $20 or smaller than $5, said Brad Maione, spokesman for the New York attorney general. "Right now there are about two million claims, and the maximum we can handle is about eight million," Maione said. "Anything over that and the money goes back to the states." If the money does go to the states, it will join the music CDs that states are receiving in the settlement. The CDs will be given to public establishments and nonprofit organizations, Steingard said.

Those involved in the case say they are convinced the proposed settlement will be approved when both sides go back to court on May 22.

Since the music companies and retailers must pay their allotted amounts of money in the settlement, there is a possibility that the price of CDs will increase to make up for monetary losses, Maione said. Still, price increases for CDs do not just depend on the lawsuit settlement, because mp3 downloading can also hurt music companies and retailers, Maione said.

"I think artists are already losing a lot of money with people downloading music," Kara Hartman (senior-information sciences and technology) said. "But [the settlement] is cool -- you're getting free money."