• by Gavin O'Malley  @mp_gavin, October 14, 2005

Yahoo! Music and Stanford University announced their plans Thursday to offer students free access to the Yahoo! Music Unlimited subscription service in about a week. The partnership is consistent with efforts by other music downloading companies and U.S. colleges that are giving students incentives to limit their illegal file-sharing.

Free of charge, students can play and download music from a library of over 1 million songs; subscribe and listen to commercial-free Internet radio stations; share music with other subscribers using Yahoo! Messenger; transfer tracks onto compatible portable devices; import music from compact discs; and create play lists. The free subscriptions are being offered on a trial basis until October of next year. After that date, students will be offered discounted subscriptions.

In conjunction with college officials attempting to curb illegal file-sharing, online music companies including Cdigix, Napster, RealNetworks' Rhapsody, and Ruckus Network have begun to offer download discounts to colleges and universities.

Rhapsody, for example, costs as little as $2 a month at the University of California, Berkeley compared to the typical $9.95 monthly charge, while music downloads through Cdigix are available to University of Michigan students for just $2.50 monthly, compared to the usual $3 a month charge. The first deal between a college and downloading service dates back to January of 2004, when Pennsylvania State University started offering Napster on a free trial basis to students at one of its 24 campuses.