Napster and Dell are teaming up to give College students a legal way to get their music.
Dell will bundle their PowerEdge 1855 servers with Napster’s digital music service to allow Colleges to implement the hardware and allow students to listen and purchase music from their local campuses. This means extremely fast downloads and easy access to hundreds of thousands of songs.
So far the two companies have signed on the University of Washington, who will debut the service during the upcoming school year. Napster already provides a similar service to thirteen other universities.
Pricing for students will be discounted and sold through Dell, bundled alongside Dell’s DJ MP3 player.
Late last month, a court rules in favour of the record labels, saying that peer to peer services such as Grokster can be held responsible for the trading of illegal music.
Software giant Microsoft is said to be investigating its foray into the subscription MP3 download market after announcing its MSN Music service last year that competes with Apple’s iTunes.
The new service would offer users a subscription model, similar to how Real’s service and Napster’s service work.
“We are actively investigating the subscription model, but we don’t have anything to share today,” Christine Andrews, lead product manager of Microsoft’s MSN Internet division told Reuters, “Once we are ready to talk more, we’ll let you know.”
The latest player to enter this market was Yahoo, who introduced their own subscription service at prices much less than that of their competitors.
The subscription model allows users to listen to unlimited songs each month, however, a fee must be paid if they want to burn the track to a CD.
Yahoo is launching a beta version of its brand new subscription based MP3 downloading service tomorrow (May 11th, 2005) and it’s already being seen as a major threat to rivals Napster and Real Network’s Rhapsody service. Yahoo will launch its subscription service starting at US$4.99 month, compared to Napster’s US$14.95 a month fee and Rhapsody’s US$9.99 a month fee.
David Goldberg, Yahoo Music General Manager, tells Reuters that prices may go up once the trial run is complete. “We’re not saying it’s the price forever, but we’re assuming it’s the price throughout the Beta (trial) period, which is an undetermined amount of time,”
Shares of Real and Napster fell 12% and 20% in after hours trading, respectively. Yahoo, which currently operates the Yahoo Instant Messenger service, said users will be able to share music with friends as well as transfer songs to their portable devices. Yahoo’s music will only be compatible with devices that support Microsoft’s Windows Media format, forcing iPod users to use Apple’s iTunes store.
Yahoo’s initial library will consist of 1 million songs. Users who wish to copy or own the music will have to pay an additional US$0.79 per song.
