Dell, Napster to Deliver Digital Music to U.S. College Campuses

The offering, available immediately, combines Napster's digital music service with Dell PowerEdge 1855 blade servers to help institutions increase network bandwidth availability while providing students with a premium, legal digital music service virtually free of the viruses, spyware and other security risks that often accompany the downloading of unauthorized music. The University of Washington (UW) will be the first school to employ this comprehensive solution starting this fall.

Both Dell and Napster have been at the forefront of providing solutions to higher education customers. This partnership augments Napster's pioneering university initiative launched in November 2003.

"As a leading provider of technology to U.S. colleges and universities, we hear from customers regularly that illegal music downloads put them, their students and their networks at risk," said John Mullen, vice president of Dell's higher education business. "Napster paved the way for legal, subscription-based music services, and with this partnership, Dell is able to address what's become a common IT challenge for university CIOs."

Dell and Napster are also working together on sales and marketing. Starting this fall, Dell will sell subscriptions to Napster's digital music service to colleges and universities at a discounted academic rate through Dell account executives. Colleges will be able to use Dell blade servers on campus to store music from Napster's library locally, allowing network processing speed to remain fast while hundreds of students simultaneously download digital music.

UW Offers Service to Students Starting Fall 2005

Dell Services will install 10 Dell PowerEdge 1855 blade servers on UW's Seattle campus that will feature Napster's SuperPeer cache application. The application is designed to deliver music and other Napster content that is stored on a caching server located within the campus network.

"In this era of pervasive broadband networks and extraordinary new personal devices, it is important for universities to establish mechanisms that provide our students with high quality, legal access to the growing body of content available in digital repositories worldwide," said Dr. Mark Emmert, UW president. "This relationship with Dell and Napster will provide us with a state-of-the-art approach to downloading music."

In addition, UW faculty, staff and students can purchase discounted computer systems, electronics and DellTM DJ digital music players through a dedicated Dell Premier Page at http://www.dell.com/huskies.

Dell will work closely throughout the implementation process with institutions that select the hardware and service offering. Dell will provide tools to help schools market the Napster service to students and will offer special prices on bundles that include one of Dell's three digital music players, the Dell Pocket DJ, Dell Digital Jukebox (DJ) 20 and the Dell DJ 30. These devices are compatible with Napster To Go, Napster's portable subscription service, giving students who use these devices the ability to easily transfer thousands of music files1 to take on the go.

"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 chief executive officer, 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."