Spotify banned from Oxford University

Spotify - not going to graduate from Oxford with honours
Spotify - not going to graduate from Oxford with honours

Students at Oxford University will have to put up with a Spotify free existence from now on, after its IT department decided to ban the online music service.

Spotify has been accused of eating up too much bandwidth at Britain's oldest university, which has led the OUCS (Oxford University Computer Services) department to issue a ban.

Naxos, schmaxos

Speaking to Cherwell, the online site for Oxford University student news, a number of students have spoke of their anger over the ban with words like "shocked" and "discrimination" being bandied around.

One student, who is decidedly up in arms over the denial of Spotify access, said to Cherwell: "I use it loads. It's the most comprehensive collection of classical music in one place. Much better than Naxos."

Wise spending

OUCS has responded to criticism, noting that: "Bandwidth that seems insignificant for one user will soon add up when scaled up to the many thousands of users connected to Oxford University's networks.

"It is one thing attempting to justify a network upgrade on the basis of a genuine academic requirement, such as the petabytes of data expected from CERN when their latest collider comes online.

"Taxpayers and research councils tend to like to see their money being spent more wisely."

What's more wise than offering up free music to the UK's most priveleged? Sheesh, what's the world coming too?

Via TechCrunch

Marc Chacksfield

Marc Chacksfield is the Editor In Chief, Shortlist.com at DC Thomson. He started out life as a movie writer for numerous (now defunct) magazines and soon found himself online - editing a gaggle of gadget sites, including TechRadar, Digital Camera World and Tom's Guide UK. At Shortlist you'll find him mostly writing about movies and tech, so no change there then.