Students Say No To University Provided Napster

from the why-bother? dept

We were a bit surprised last year when Napster went with a big push to sign up various universities to offer Napster to students. The deals seemed kind of questionable -- with Napster and the universities trying to hide the real costs while students were not at all happy that their university administrators decided how to spend their music dollars for them. As if to drive this point home in a fairly astounding way, a new report says that at one of the earliest universities to sign up for this deal, the University of Rochester, not a single student bought a song from Napster during last fall's semester. Of course, this is a little misleading -- as part of the agreement is that students get to "rent" the songs for free as long as they're on campus, so there's less incentive to buy tracks. However, plenty of students did buy tracks at competing music stores like iTunes, suggesting that Napster's attempt to lock students in with this deal isn't exactly working. If anything, it sounds like it's driving the students away.

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