Napster Debuts College Service with Dell

Napster and Dell will team up to provide a comprehensive solution for colleges, where schools who buy Dell's PowerEdge 1855 servers will actually be able to host music from the Napster library on school machines. The companies say this will speed up network performance by keeping downloads on the internal network.

So far only one school, the University of Washington, has signed up for the package and will launch it in the fall semester. The new program will augment the previous initiative by Napster to target colleges that it started in late 2003.

As part of the deal, Dell will also begin to sell discounted subscriptions to the Napster Music Service to schools and universities through its own channels.

"We have no doubt that both colleges and students will benefit tremendously from a solution that combines Napster's premium digital music service with Dell's industry-leading technology and services," said Chris Gorog, chairman and CEO of Napster.

"As the first digital music service to offer a solution to colleges and universities, we are proud to take this offering to the next level with Dell."

The company is the only one of the legal digital music services to have such an arrangment with schools. Thus far, 13 universities have signed up for the previous service, which only included a co-branded music player and interface to the Napster service.

However, results have not been overly impressive. Only 58,000 students have signed up, even though Napster counts such large universities as UNC, NC State, Penn State, and the University of Miami.

One possible reason could be the portable music players these students own. Studies have shown that almost 7 out of every 10 music players are Apple iPods, which are incompatible with Napster's Windows Media based service.