Rdio Seeks The College Crowd With Half-Off Unlimited Music
By Eliot Van Buskirk of Evolver.fm.
Napster, famously, was birthed in a college dormitory. Universities were also the place where hopes were once pinned for blanket, ISP-level music licenses, because they’re a sort of microcosm of the world at large. If making a whole population pay for music en masse works there, theg thinking went, perhaps it would work in the world at large, too.
Blanket licenses for colleges never took off, but Rdio, which also offers a unique family plan for paying for on-demand music, has a simpler offer for students: Pay for Rdio’s on-demand music subscription, and it’ll only cost you half as much as it does for non-students. This means you can access the vast majority of available recorded music for $2.50 per month on a computer’s web browser, or $5 per month on smartphones, tablets, and other non-computers.
To qualify, you actually have to be an active student at a U.S. college. Rdio asks for the name of your school, your name, and the last four digital of your social security number, so you likely won’t be able to fudge this. (If you’re a student in the UK, Spotify offers a similar plan.)
But if you are a bona fide student, 50 percent off of Rdio is a deal that’s hard to argue with. After all, $5 is only about a third of the cost of a bowl of decent ramen noodles.
