online music service available to students cheap

Micronetters,

I'm happy to announce that as of last Friday we have a signed deal with
Real Networks for our students to sign up for the Rhapsody online digital
music service at an extremely good price: $2/month, with the price guaranteed
until Aug 20, 2005.

In addition, undergraduate students can sign up to use the service for free
up until October 31, 2004. If they do not wish to pay they can opt out anytime
before that date. Graduate students will not get a free period.

We are all hoping that this service, at this price, will drastically reduce
the amount of time the University has to spend dealing with copyright violations
and the resulting legal and disciplinary fall-out.

Here are some details:

1) The service allows unlimited listening to music on a Windows PC as long as
    the PC is attached to the Internet.

2) To buy and burn an individual track costs $.79.

3) Our contract with Rhapsody is non-exclusive.

4) We do not have to guarantee a minimum number of subscribers.

5) We (CNS) are doing the validation that an applicant is a student, and
    we are billing the student subscribers the $2/month via CARS. The
    $.79/track is a credit card transaction between the subscriber and
    Rhapsody.

6) CNS unfortunately ;-) is not getting a cut of the $2. My hope is that
    the service becomes very popular and thus we realize reduced costs in
    terms of staff time and Internet bandwidth charges.

7) The music content is delivered from Lightstream Networks, which peers with
    CalREN, so the content does not cross our Commodity Internet connection.

You can see the sign-up page at:

        http://rhapsody.berkeley.edu

                Thanks,
                        Cliff

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Received on Tue Aug 24 11:11:39 2004