“In an attempt to curb illegal music downloading over the residential network, Brown University is offering the Napster 2.0 music service to students for free this year in a trial program. Napster is ‘the best we could offer at this point’ in terms of ‘a legitimate alternative to illegal file sharing,’ said David Greene, vice president for Campus Life and Student Services,” Ben Leubsdorf reports for The Brown Daily Herald.
Leubsdorf reports, “The Herald reported in February that a committee drawn from Computing and Information Services, Campus Life and Student Services and UCS met with representatives from four music services: Rhapsody, Cdigix, Ruckus and Napster. ‘There was strong consensus’ among the group of staff and students ‘that Napster was the best service at this time,’ Greene said. ‘Napster had the most to offer Brown,’ said Brian Bidadi ’06, UCS president. But, he said, ‘depending on the feedback we get from students, we can go in a different direction.’ Saxton-Frump agreed, ‘Napster seemed to make sense for a pilot program,’ noting its ease of use and large music library of 1.5 million songs.”
“However, the service is not compatible with either the Macintosh operating system or with Apple’s popular iPod music player, which has cornered more than 83 percent of the digital music player market, according to industry estimates,” Leubsdorf reports. “None of the four services examined were compatible with Macintosh or Linux, according to Saxton-Frump, so Napster did not stand out in that regard. ‘We did try to get a discount from Apple so that we could offer an alternative service for iPods, but the discount offered was not a great incentive,’ Ellen Waite-Franzen, vice president for CIS, wrote in an e-mail to The Herald… In the meantime, he said, Macintosh users can run Napster using the VirtualPC program. Saxton-Frump suggested that Macintosh users run their accounts on University computers in clusters around campus.”
Full article here.
Congratulations, Brown, on the purchase of your new Edsel.
Information for schools interested in including all of their students, including large communities of Mac users and iPod users should investigate Apple’s “iTunes on Campus” program, which includes volume licensing and features for BOTH Mac and Windows users.
Related articles:
The Mac is the ‘Nigger’ of the Computer Industry – Rodney O. Lain
Napster is a joke – April 05, 2005
Napster’s dirty little secret: changing subscription services into downloads is easy – February 19, 2005
Napster-To-Go’s ‘rental music’ DRM circumvented – February 14, 2005Why ‘Napster To Go’ will flop – February 03, 2005
Cornell University’s Mac users ‘uniformly unhappy’ with Napster – January 19, 2005
Cornell University wrestles with Napster’s exclusion of Mac and iPod-using students – September 08, 2004
Why are Cornell’s Mac students being forced to pay for useless Napster? – September 07, 2004Napster schools to Mac-using students: bend over and take it – September 04, 2004
Apple launches ‘iTunes on Campus’ institutional site license program – April 28, 2004
Because those in charge are on the take.
Who care what some bitch ass cabron is shelling out money for. Higher education is becoming more and more irrelevant.
Congratulation Brown for choosing the best available option given to them. MDN, when did Apple start a subscription service?… Oh, that’s right, they don’t have one.
MDN, On your related articles, why did Rodney O. Lain’s article with it’s somewhat irking title have to be listed first? Normally you list the articles in a reverse-chronological order with the most recent at the beginning. What’s up with ya! (I miss Rodney and before I heard of him, I thought I was the only Black person using Macs.) Just why did that article with it’s title have to be first? He’s written other stuff that explained the point as eloquently under different titles. Hollah at your boy … (Or do I take you out of my bookmarks?)
Zupchuck, who said anything about a subscription service? Napster wasn’t chosen because of the subscription service, but probably despite it. Napster probably offered deeper discounts than Apple. In fact, I’m pretty sure Napster discounts all the way down to $2 or less per student for subscriptions. Had Brown gone with Apple, Apple would have given them volume discounts on all songs purchased from the iTMS. Basically, Brown buys a number of songs at a discount and passes the savings on to the students when they make the purchase. Either would have worked, but because Napster is on a subscription model it probably was cheaper for the school…pay one price and get unlimited songs. Of course, once those student graduate those songs will be unplayable. But hey, go Napster…right? Heh.
How foolish of me to think all the dumb government, education and mayoral (as in New Orleans) administrators are in Louisiana!!
“We did try to get a discount from Apple so that we could offer an alternative service for iPods, but the discount offered was not a great incentive”
Apple: “We’re prepared to offer you this great software that is nothing more than an interface to our store, and we’re going to give it to you for free.”
Brown: “Wow. How much does it regularly cost?”
Apple: “Nothing.”
Brown: “So why is this offer special?”
Apple: “Well, we offer volume licensing.”
Brown: “For a product that’s free and available to everyone already?”
Apple: “Exactly”
Brown: “So how does this benefit us? Doesn’t everyone that has an iPod already have the iTunes software? So in effect, is this just an attempt to try to get your store into all of our student’s computers without actually offering us anything in return?”
Apple: “Ah, you’re using logic to defend against the reality distortion field. You’re obviously being paid by MS. We refuse your offer.”
Brown: “Um, whatever… Let’s find someone that will actually work with us.”
Well, Mac and Linux users could hit Brown with technological discrimination charges of some sort. No one should be left out in the cold.
Apple should do something different for college campuses since Apple is the only one with any sort of cross-platform solution, though Apple needs to unleash iTunes/Quicktime for Linux to make it complete.
As someone who actually goes to Brown, its nothing new here. The higher ups who make the decisions also went with Microsoft exchange server for email and that has been the expected disaster…
you can’t run P2P software on Brown’s network anyway, they block it so the kidz just use iTunes….
I think the kind of discount Brown was looking for from apple (perhaps less than 50 cents/song) is something that apple cannot do without cooperation from the music labels. Without cooperation, apple loses 20 cents on every song purchased.
Why are colleges trying to make money off music sales? its that the business colleges are in today?
Someone needs to explain this to me: Why is a legal download service for stoodents necessary AT ALL? There is no logical explanation, other than to make a big pile of money (to go with the big pile of marketing manure?).
Go after the criminal individuals and punish them — what a novel concept! But no, that would be too simple. We now have a discussion on what music download service is best… talk about choosing *how* you get it up your Hershey Highway, because you *will* get a hot beef injection. Sheesh
don’t say in the article that they only were looking at subscription services. It seems to have come down to money on that one, since they do note that Apple didn’t give them enough of a discount. Also, students still have to individually pay to own in this service.
I don’t like subscription services for myself, though I do see the attraction and understand why it would be useful for mitigating student use of P2P services for illegal downloading. These services should have an opt-out clause. If I were at Brown, I’d rather put that $ to CDs or downloads that work with my iPod.
can’t Brown and other colleges and universities just offer iTunes. The quality is just better. therefore it is worth more and ends up being cheaper in a quality to price comparison. Also, colleges. university’s should stop being M$’s little pet dog. I know the college I do is. Their email service uses exchange. Can’t they understand the superiority of IMAP. They also only give M$ software. They give out just about every piece of microshit there is. If you have Linux, Amiga, ect.. too bad. At least they offer some Mac software ( M$ Office 2004). Could they not offer the superior office suit-Appleworks.
If you are going to use P2P, aren’t you intending to keep the files? What would then be the point of using Napster, if then, to keep the files you have to fork over more money? Seems to me that there is little incentive to use Napster.
One would choose to use Napster because they feel like being nice with the RIAA.
TrevX,
Did you expect Apple to offer a per-song discount equally as compelling as Napster’s subscription service?
This is a campus environment where illegal copying is rampant and there are plenty of PCs sharing their dubious content. Brown is trying to offer an affordable alternative to the P2P copying.
Apple may have offered a minor discount to iTMS, but probably not enough for Apple to remain in the black on the sales, remain attractive enough for “poor” college students (or their parents), and keep Brown looking responsible enough to the RIAA to keep them out of Brown’s hair.
So, if Napster offered a subscription service to each student for $5/month (as an example), all sides are covered – except for the fact that probably 80% of the student body is paying for something they can’t/won’t use. A great situation for Napster.
Basically, Brown is paying extortion money to the RIAA to keep them at bay. That is what should be upsetting. Not that Brown U. adminstrators are stupid or incompetent for chossing a non-Apple product.
Chris D. said: “Someone needs to explain this to me: Why is a legal download service for stoodents necessary AT ALL? There is no logical explanation, other than to make a big pile of money (to go with the big pile of marketing manure?).”
Universities provide internet access to their students. They are afraid that by doing so they will be liable if their students do “illegal” things like sharing music files. Therefore, they offer a legal alternative to give them protection from possible lawsuits. With the legal alternative in place, no one can claim that they knowingly “looked the other way” while student (or other) users of their network committed theft.
Providing the Napster service doesn’t prevent anyone from using iTunes. However, only Napter users will get the discount, which is probably paid for from tuition or other student fees. So the students who don’t use Napster will be paying for the ones who do.
Yeah, it’s a piece of junk and no one will use it, BUT IT’S CHEAP!
Idiots
Why would anyone pay for junk even if it’s cheap. Junk = junk = worthless = all smart people wouldn’t pay for it. Now that I think about it, some people may pay for it. After all, they pay for Wincrap. Any Mac user which is a Mac user would not however. That is because Mac users are smarter, richer, more productive and have better sex lives than their Wincrap counterparts.
I’m with twdldee. These cabrones shoud provide education, not music downloads or music subscription services. What next … make-out-rooms?
We believe that if students are going to fcuk around, they should do it in hygienic quarters supervised by sex counsellors and cheered on by faculty members.
They obviously do not understand the market, consumer choice or business in general,
A glorified Liberal Arts College with the emphasis on LIBERAL.
To the folks calling the Brown U. administrators idiots, cabrones, etc. –
Ever think that perhaps schools need to cover their collective arses from RIAA intrusions into their networks and providing a cheap music download solution shows some due dilligence as some other posters suggested?
That sounds quite a bit more than stupid.
And Napster has found its niche – collecting protection money from schools as a shill of the RIAA.
I don’t believe that Apple’s “alternative” is much of one. However, there’s no point in forcing all students to pay for a service that a significant fraction of them can’t use. The minority should never be forced to subsidize the majority (at least not for something as trivial as a music service).
brown sucks
go big green