The date was January 12, and the time, 9 am. And it’ll go down in Hollywood history as one of the entertaiment industry’s most remarkable marketing triumphs.

It was “mere hours into the spring semester” - and more than 2,600 of Penn State University’s approximately 17,000 on-campus resident students eligible to use Napster had registered for the service.

“The University and online music service provider quietly turned on the system over the weekend to allow on-campus residence hall students at Penn State - at no additional cost to them - to register and access more than half a million digital quality songs, streaming digital music stations and other Napster premium features,” says PennState Live here.

“This trial service is the first one of its kind anywhere.”

It’s also the first time the Big Five record labels have succeeded in ‘persuading’ an American university to become their personal promotional vehicle with the university president (Graham Spanier) and executive vp/provost (Rod Erickson) in the front seat.

“The registration process linking Penn State’s and Napster’s computer system has worked flawlessly for the vast majority of students who used it,” says PennState Live. “Only a few students faced difficulty with the registration due to a new authorization protocol.

“Given the scope and technical complexity associated with the launch of this trial service, Penn State’s Information Technology Services staff expect to work through these problems quickly.”

(It was nothin’ folks [big grin] all part of the service : )

This entry was posted on Friday, January 16th, 2004 at 12:43 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

HOME

Viewed 1811 times