KNOXVILLE — A digital music subscription service is now available free of charge to University of Tennessee students. The service also will be available to all faculty and staff for $5.99 a month.
The UTunes project provides a legal, convenient and economic way for students to download music or videos. It also is an attempt to help students understand the issues surrounding illegal downloading.
“The University was asked by the Student Government Association several years ago to research and present a plan for a legal and technologically-safe music subscription program that could be available to UT students,” said Ron Laffitte, associate dean of students.
The service is provided by Ctrax. More than 110,000 artists are available for download. The service is free of viruses, spyware and adware.
Songs can be downloaded for free, but users will pay a fee of $0.89 per song or $9.99 per album to permanently own the files.
Users also can pay $6.99 per month and subscribe to Ctrax2go that allows users to download songs to a portable device. The service is not compatible with iPods, however users may buy tracks, burn them to a CD, re-rip the songs to mp3s and then transfer them to an iPod.
Ctrax will provide four services to UT students, including the basic music subscription service, Cvillage, Cflix and Clabs.
Cvillage is a social networking platform that lets students post their digital files and share feedback. Cflix is a subscription and pay-per-view, video-on-demand service. Clabs is an educational media-sharing service.
For more information, visit http://www.ctraxmusic.com or http://oit.utk.edu/utunes.
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Contacts:
Ron Laffitte, associate dean of students, 974-3179, ronl@utk.edu
Beth Gladden, media relations, 974-9008,
beth.gladden@tennessee.edu
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