Ruckus Closes Down

An anonymous reader writes "According to TechCrunch, Ruckus, the ad-supported music service targeted at college students, has closed down for good. Ruckus was notable for its poorly-designed client software and .wma-only DRM-laden catalog of 3,000,000 tracks, somewhat less than half the size of the iTunes catalog."

Good riddance.

[vishbar]

Ruckus plus FairUse4WM made for a good time. The only reason I used it was to download the songs, strip the DRM, and put 'em on my iPod as beautiful, DRM-free mp3s. The client itself was horrible. I won't be missing it one bit.

Dominated by streaming services

[vigmeister]

I used Ruckus when it came out as my music provider, but moved to streaming music providers like deezer [slashdot.org] when they popped up. To be blunt, Ruckus had nothing more to offer than these services except the joys of installing a poorly written piece of software on your computer. I, for one, am not likely to miss it.

Cheers!

Re:Uhhhh.....free?

[Jurily]

I think it was far more notable for that fact that it gave away almost half the size of the itunes catalog for free.

Now that they're closing down, how long can the customers use those tracks?

My uni apparently didn't get the memo

[rfunches]

My university's website still links to Ruckus for "Music--Free and Legal Downloading" and we just had a whole bunch of copyright "awareness" posters put up in our computer labs that I think mention Ruckus.

Of course, every time I heard their name, my first thought was always "Are they still around?" If it wasn't clear before, the music labels don't care about anyone other than themselves, given the sudden shutdown.

The news item is rather subjective though.

[aliquis]

Yeah, DRM may not be that nice, but it's there in most commercial cases and WMA isn't any worse than DRMed AAC, probably better.

The "omg only 3 million songs! iTunes have twice as many! Apple rule!" line doesn't help either ..

Personally I have never heard about it before but I think it's sad one ad supported alternative dies because choice and diversity is a good thing, and some people would probably rather have ads but plenty of music than very little music because they can't afford more.

Whole news item summary sounds like an Apple troll.

Re:The news item is rather subjective though.

[Darundal]

I thought colleges bought subscriptions for their students, not just promoted it.