The University of Rochester has signed a deal with Napster to stream popular music to the 3,700 students who live on the campus, and company officials say several other colleges are poised to sign up for campuswide music services as well.

Since Pennsylvania State University at University Park signed a similar deal with Napster last year, many college officials have been considering whether they should follow suit -- though some of them wonder whether it makes sense for colleges to get into the business of buying music for students.

Officials at Rochester said on Wednesday that they were not allowed to discuss the price of the deal, which will allow students who live in dormitories on the River Campus and at the Eastman School of Music to have free access to Napster's subscription music service, beginning later this semester. That service usually costs $9.95 per person per month, but Napster officials say the university is getting a discounted rate.

Meanwhile, Napster gets music-loving subscribers who might use other features of the service, such as the ability to download a song and burn it onto a CD for 99 cents. The service does not work on Apple computers or on PC's running older versions of Microsoft's Windows operating system.

For Rochester, the decision to sign up with Napster stemmed from research done by the Joint Committee of the Higher Education and Entertainment Communities Technology Task Force, which includes college officials and representatives from the music and motion-picture industries. The committee is led by Penn State's president, Graham B. Spanier.

Charles Phelps, Rochester's provost, serves as the chairman of the committee's technology panel, which put out a call to companies in April 2003 asking them to submit information about their music services and about what kind of discounts they could offer to colleges. More than half a dozen companies responded, including Napster, and the committee published the details on its Web site.

"I'm quite confident there will be others as well," said Mr. Phelps, noting that several colleges are investigating similar deals with Napster or other companies.

Aileen Atkins, a senior vice president of business affairs and general counsel for Napster, said the company was negotiating with "a number of different schools," though she refused to name any of them. "Over the next few months you'll definitely hear additional deals in place," she said.

Mr. Phelps said he expected that offering streaming music over campus networks would soon become as common as offering cable television in dorms, which many colleges have done for years.

A prime motivation for Rochester officials was encouraging students to get their music legally, rather than pirating copies of songs using popular music-trading services like KaZaA. Mr. Phelps said that in one recent month, the university received a stack of letters "an inch thick" from music companies demanding that specific users of the university network cease sharing copyrighted music illegally.

Colleges have a "responsibility to help students understand the law and what is proper legal and moral behavior," said Mr. Phelps, who added that the university was planning a series of public discussions to inform students about copyright issues. The university is also planning an optional for-credit course next fall on "the legality of file sharing."

Some colleges watching these developments, however, have decided that the cost of a service like Napster's is too high in a time of shrinking budgets.

Gregory A. Jackson, chief information officer of the University of Chicago, said on Wednesday that universities should focus on education rather than on helping students build their music collections.

"I agree fully that we have an obligation to get our folks to behave in legal ways," he said. "That's education. You don't do that by buying them stuff."

"My belief," he added, "is there aren't going to be a whole lot of places that go out and do this unless the price is really, really low."