“The company behind the Napster 2.0 online music service said Monday it has signed agreements with several universities to offer students its digital song subscription program,” Alex Veiga reports for The Associated Press. “Beginning in the fall, students at Cornell University, The George Washington University, Middlebury College, the University of Miami, The University of Southern California and Wright State University will have access to the service through the schools, the company said.”
“The Napster deals are one of many steps colleges nationwide are taking to discourage illegal music file-sharing among students,” Veiga reports.
Full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: Do the schools realize that their students all have iPods and iPod minis, organize their digital music collections via Apple’s iTunes, and they’ll have to burn CDs from Napster’s WMA files before they can import them into iTunes for transfer to their iPods? What a mess! Since Napster songs and albums cost the same as iTunes, students are just going to use Napster as a radio, if they use it at all, providing the school doesn’t charge them too much. And they’ll buy songs for their iPods directly from iTunes anyway. The three students at each school who got Dell Digital Junkboxes for Christmas from their crazy Aunt Louise will undoubtedly be thrilled. The rest will probably transfer to Duke.
Related MacDailyNews article:
Duke University to give Apple iPods to all incoming freshman – July 19, 2004
A part from any other consideration, I do not see the point of schools offering to their students a music subscription. In my viewpoint it is much more constructive the Duke’s approach.
Their students yes, they can use it for music but not only, they have the door open for a much wider and hopefully intelligent use
Having gone to Wright State (before transferring), I’m not surprised.
Some terms of endearment for the place:
-Concrete Campus
-Nuc-u-lar fall out shelter (see the school’s crest)
-The “other” school in Dayton
-and my favorite – Wright State, wrong idea.