According to USA Today, several American colleges are signing up with legal online music services and expect to launch the services for their students by January, 2005 rather than by next semester (September) due increased demand from students.
Previously the adoption of school-wide licensing deals with likes of Napster have been driven by campus administrators willing to cut down their bandwidth requirements as use of centralized, legal online music service is bound to reduce the enormous P2P traffic many dorms and campuses face. But since RIAA's jihad against P2P users in the United States seems to continue forever, many students have become to realize that having an option to download legal tracks with heavily subsidized prices doesn't sound too bad. Specially after many of the recent P2P lawsuits have been brought against students themselves.
One of the winners in this new mass-licensing game seems to be a company called Cdigix which, unlike its competitors, also provides educational material and movies via its service. One of the universities to sign up with Cdigiz is University of Michigan which will ask its students to cough up $2.50 a month in order to use the service.
But there have been setbacks as well -- in University of California's Berkeley campus, only 1,000 of its 31,000 students have signed up to Rhapsody despite ths ervice costing only $2 a month for students.
Source: USA Today
One of the winners in this new mass-licensing game seems to be a company called Cdigix which, unlike its competitors, also provides educational material and movies via its service. One of the universities to sign up with Cdigiz is University of Michigan which will ask its students to cough up $2.50 a month in order to use the service.
But there have been setbacks as well -- in University of California's Berkeley campus, only 1,000 of its 31,000 students have signed up to Rhapsody despite ths ervice costing only $2 a month for students.
Source: USA Today
