Licenses still available to dorm residents
Kayla Webley
2005-11-03
The Daily
After more than a month of availability, less than half of the UW’s eligible students have signed up for the Napster downloading program.
The UW and Dell purchased licenses for 3,000 residence hall students to use the music downloading service, which allows students to access the more than one million songs in Napster’s music library.
As of Oct. 31, Napster reported 1,283 residence hall students had signed up for the service.
“This project is very much an experiment. I don’t think we have specific goals set — we’re sort of watching to see how it goes,” said Oren Sreebny, director of client services in computing and communications. “I’m not sure what to make of the number of signups to date. It seems a little slower than I anticipated, but who knows what to expect in these matters?”
The UW receives periodic reports from Napster on the number of students who have registered with the program. According to a report released after the first three days of classes, 585 students were registered to use the service. The report showed that an additional 698 had signed up since the first week of classes.
Sreebny said the UW is less concerned with overall signups and more concerned with whether students are continuing to use the program.
“It’s fairly easy to sign up, but do they keep using it over time?” Sreebny asked.
Residence hall students have been able to use the Napster program for free thanks to an agreement negotiated between the UW, Napster and Dell last summer.
Though Napster has similar partnerships with 13 other universities nationwide, the UW is the first university to include a hardware provider in the agreement.
The UW spent $24,000 for 1,500 licenses for residence hall students to use the music service. Dell paid the remaining expenses, which included an additional 1,500 licenses and 10 PowerEdge servers. The servers are valued at $52,887, not including a $7,200 installation fee.
The UW has yet to conduct any survey to gage students’ thoughts on the service, though Sreebny said focus groups might be conducted in the future.
“I haven’t heard many people talking about it because there are other ways of getting music,” said Marley Blonsky, the Resident Hall Student Association’s (RHSA) programming director.
Blonsky said she has heard mixed results from those using the program. The downside to Napster is that songs can only be used on the Web site, not saved onto a student’s hard drive. Napster songs cannot be stored on iPods, either.
Blonsky said the Napster Web site is “confusing,” adding that some students do not know how to get the free music once they go to the site.
“It’s nice because you can find a lot of songs on there that you can’t download from other places,” she said. “But it’s annoying because you can’t do anything with the songs. If you could put it on your iPod, it’d be a lot more helpful.”
Blonsky thinks there should be more advertising and promotion for the service. Many students probably still don’t know it exists, she said.
Several activities promoting the Napster program went on during orientation, including a Dell launch event negotiated in the contractual agreement. The UW also agreed to exclusively promote the pocket DJ, Dell’s version of the iPod; have Dell kiosks on campus; and host Dell information on the UW’s Web site.
The residence halls have not hosted any events designed to promote the Napster program.
“If [Dell or Napster] approached us we could definitely sit down and have a conversation about the type of program they’d like to have,” said RHSA resident M’Liss Dewald. “We are definitely open to people coming to us with program ideas.”
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