Ruckus Closes Down 125
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."
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People will be missing their music if not the service. From TFA:
Weâ(TM)re told that music that has not passed its âoerenew dateâ still works, but that music that has expired will no longer work because the DRM licensing server has apparently shut down.
Oops. Another hard lesson in why not to trust DRMed media.
Good riddance. (Score:5, Interesting)
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The news item is rather subjective though. (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
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Whole news item summary sounds like an Apple troll.
I disagree. If you've ever used Ruckus, you can't say you liked it. Most of iTunes is DRM-free now anyways. The only reason Ruckus got any popularity was because it was marketed to college campuses as a safe alternative to file sharing. Naturally, paranoid campuses (such as mine) promoted it heavily, trying to keep the RIAA off their backs.
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I thought colleges bought subscriptions for their students, not just promoted it.
No, they bought it on behalf of their students, and lumped it into their tuition, along with those big paychecks for the administrators.
Once they set up an account "on behalf of the students" and said "here, use this", they didn't give a shit one way or another, since if the RIAA started badgering them, they could point at that and say "We're not culpable, we tried to do it your way". Of course, they're not doing it to protect the students, they were doing it to protect their own asses.
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If you've ever used Ruckus, you can't say you liked it.
That's for sure. If it were just graphical ads (even animated images), it might've been tolerable. With all of the flash and audio-enabled ads, it was just too much. And the audio was usually on by default, meaning I had some random internet lady talking to me while I was trying to check out some music.
That's not to mention the player, which was a little lighter on the ads (you had to go to the website to select any new music, so most of the ads were there), but for some reason always consumed all available
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Actually, Ruckus was free for students. I happen to work for the ITS department of a college, and I'd never heard about any payments we had to make for it. I do know that, if we got a certain percentage of our students signed up and using the service, the Ruckus folks would place a server at our location to help with bandwidth issues.
It did have a monthly fee for faculty/staff, however.
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I disagree. If you've ever used Ruckus, you can't say you liked it.
Not true. It was great for sampling music, or for listening to my music at work when I didn't have my Zune around. It was a little sluggish to open, but iTunes and Zune are both really slow to open too, especially with a reasonably large library. And for the other commenter complaining about audio ads--it was easy enough to skip the front page. I just bookmarked (or rather, Firefox's awesome bar took care of it for me) an album page and I always used that as my landing page. Just had to click past one
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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.
Sorry? A DRM encoded Microsoft proprietry standard is better than a DRMed MPEG standard? Not to mention ofc that Apple don't use DRM any more.
The "omg only 3 million songs! iTunes have twice as many! Apple rule!" line doesn't help either ..
It doesn't? It's purely factual, ofc, iTunes actually has 11.5 million tracks, so close to 4 times as many, not twice as many.
Whole news item
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Still you used it so it was probably better than not having it.
Though as I said I have never heard about it before or used their client so.
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I used it only because I could strip the DRM and it was provided for free by my university. Otherwise, I wouldn't have touched it--I certainly wouldn't have paid for it.
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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.
In what way is DRMed WMA better than DRMed AAC?
The "omg only 3 million songs! iTunes have twice as many! Apple rule!" line doesn't help either ..
I read that line completely differently. It seemed perfectly reasonable to me to compare an online music service to the 800lb. gorilla in the market.
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,
I would generally agree, but in this case it seems like the market did choose. They weren't put out of business by a competitor. They were put out of business because their offering wasn't compelling. Judging from the comments on this story it sounds like their software was crap.
and some people would probably rather have ads but plenty of music than very little music because they can't afford more.
That's probably true, but these guys
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In what way is DRMed WMA better than DRMed AAC?
Because DRMed WMA plays on a lot of devices, DRMed AAC plays on Apples devices only afaik.
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Although I think the DRM included on Ruckus files prevented them from being played on portable devices. IIRC, you had to pay per-track to mobilize it beyond your computer (and each account could only be used to download on two computers, although if you had multiple .edu addresses you could of course authorize more computers).
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In what way is DRMed WMA better than DRMed AAC?
Because DRMed WMA plays on a lot of devices, DRMed AAC plays on Apples devices only afaik.
DRMed AAC plays on 70% of the devices being used by consumers, but only one manufacturer's device.
DRMed WMA plays on a lot of manufacturers' devices that nobody seems to want. I'm not sure that makes it better.
Also, DRM on AAC is trivial to remove from the audio file. I understand it to be nontrivial to do so to DRMed WMA, but have no experience doing so, so that certainly could be incorrect.
Also, assuming daedae is correct in his response, it sounds like the DRMed WMA files from Ruckus won't play on any of
It's not actually that subjective (Score:1)
As someone who used to occasionally use Ruckus, it really was pretty terrible for a lot of reasons:
-very little music from independent artists. I couldn't find 3/4 of what I wanted on there. (Although I can't find a third or so of what I listen to on Amazon either, so your mileage may have varied.)
-absolutely horrific client software that only worked on Windows (because the DRM was available only there). This was a big deal when 60-70% of your campus was running OS X.
-wma's don't work on iPods, which are fa
Half of iTunes sounds pretty darn good... (Score:1)
in my book.
Heck DRM'd WMA has more hardware player options than DRM AAC, mostly because iTunes only lets you copy your AACs to iPods, but you already knew that :P
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The easiest way to strip it was to never install WMP10 in the first place. Stick with WMP9. What, Ruckus requires the latest version of WMP? Just run Ruckus (and the installer) in Win2k compatibility mode, and voila, WMP check gone.
Thank you MS for artificially limiting WMP10+ to not run on Win2k, and thank you Ruckus for supporting Win2k and being stupid enough for compatibility mode to keep us from upgrading our DRM.
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My school newspaper, in an introductory article to the campus-wide rollout of Ruckus to all students, actually mentioned TuneByte (or whatever the DRM circumvention software was called) as a viable alternative to using their player. It's unclear to me whether the writer and editor knew that they were advocating EULA violation in an official publication, but was hilarious nonetheless.
Uhhhh.....free? (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
I think it was far more notable for that fact that it gave away almost half the size of the itunes catalog for free.
Re:Uhhhh.....free? (Score:5, Interesting)
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?
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100% usable until you replace/reformat your computer.
Umm.. for me, that happens more often than companies go bankrupt.
Helping you understand (Score:3, Informative)
I'm happy to help you understand the things that seem beyond you.
Apple is not on your side, they only care about increasing revenue and profits just like any other monolith.
And (shocker) it turns out being customer friendly (as in forcing studios to give up DRM) brings more profits to Apple! Duh! Just because that's a primary motive of Apple does not mean the end result for you the consumer is the same as if they "were on your side". If your side is one that brings a company more profit, then in fact the
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The Apple DRM scheme works by authenticating a PC or device once, then leaving it authenticated until formatted or de-authenticated.
So if you were to authorize iTunes on a PC, disconnect it from the internet, download a bunch of songs via iTunes on a different PC under the same account, and move the files over on a thumbdrive, they would work. If Apple shut down iTunes, then you would not be able to re-authenticate a computer later, but you could still play the files on computers that were authenticated in
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but iTunes still has DRM. so what is your point about this? Any company with DRM is a time-bomb.
Exactly. I didn't say iTunes was better.
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but iTunes still has DRM.
From http://www.apple.com/itunes/whatsnew/ [apple.com]
High-quality, DRM-free music. iTunes Plus is the new standard on iTunes. Now, you can choose from millions of iTunes Plus songs from all four major music labels and thousands of independents. With iTunes Plus, you get high-quality, 256-Kbps AAC encoding. All free of burn limits and digital rights management (DRM).
No they don't.
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Actually, iTunes (probably) does still have DRM. They're planning to be completely DRM-free by the end of March.
And IIRC about 80% of the music on the iTunes store went DRM-free when they announced that they were going DRM-free.
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He's not talking about the music.
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The licenses lasted around three weeks before you'd have to check their servers and renew them
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And those DRM-laden tracks are going to keep working? Keep in mind that removing the DRM on a track -- even if you legally purchased it -- is illegal in the United States and other countries that have laws similar to the DMCA. It's also possible to to interpret the law to mean that once the DRM stops working, the tracks you illegally removed the DRM from are also considered pirated material.
Free as in you-can't-have-it-anymore (Score:2)
I wish this story would get some mainstream ink; it would hopefully give the free-as-in-X discussion a little more mindshare.
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Are you sure? I thought the issue with software like Requiem under DMCA was that you couldn't distribute legally. But possession, creation, and use were all legal.
In any case it's a moot point. Requiem will soon be obsolete with iTunes going DRM free.
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Yes, we all hate the DMCA, but I don't think a court has ruled on whether it is illegal to take DRM off of a legally purchased file. Remember, the law is what the courts say it is, not what the legislatures say it is.
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Well the courts have certainly ruled that it is illegal [2600.com] to even link to a program that is capable of taking the DRM off a legally purchased file, so I wouldn't press the point unless you can afford a legal battle and the fines that result.
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Indeed. That was a strange decision which I haven't seen applied elsewhere. I'm not ready to say that the decision was /wrong/ from a legal standpoint, but I certainly rue it. I'd be interested to see the high court rule on it, especially now that enough time has passed that judges mostly aren't completely ignorant of the internet.
Screw the law, ethically wrong (Score:2)
Yes, we all hate the DMCA, but I don't think a court has ruled on whether it is illegal to take DRM off of a legally purchased file.
Come on. With subscription "purchase" like Ruckus you don't have to be Perry Mason to distinguish the various shades of grey at work here, subscribing to music and then keeping around the recordings without payment to the artist is simply ethically wrong regardless of what you think the law may or may not say.
I'm not going to say it's stealing as it's not. But lets not bulls
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Before these services (and I would assume still today), you could subscribe to receive several CDs through the mail every month for a regular fee. Yet, your ability to listen to the CDs you already received was not dependent on your continued subscription.
A "subscription service" that depends upon membership to continue to enjoy existing benefits is not a subscription service at all. It's a rental service.
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Fair enough. I am not familiar with Ruckus, so I can't really give a good response. There is a cogent response to your comment which makes a good point about "subscription" services, but I don't even know enough to say whether that would apply to Ruckus. I don't think anything you said contradicts anything I said, so I'm happy to concede whatever point you are trying to make.
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No! You are, in fact, wrong. Circumvention is not illegal, but distributing circumvention tools is. If you manage to accidentally develop a circumvention tool, then you may use it to circumvent. You may also keep the files, as they are perfectly legal. You may not distribute the information to anyone else.
I guess the rational is that people who own the media won't want to circumvent (I know, false premise) and they are not the targets of the legislation, rather the people who obtain bit-for-bit copies, and
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Are you sure about that? Because I have followed issues with the DMCA for years, and my understanding has always been that circumvention is prohibited. In fact, the very first paragraph of the Wikipedia entry for the DMCA state this explicitly:
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The law overview [copyright.gov]
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Agreed. I hated the buggy client, the DRM, the ads. Yet this news really saddens me.
I was willing to put up with them for the chance to legally try new music. If I heard a song by an artist that sounded interesting, my first step was always to see if Ruckus had them, download an album or two, and check them out. If I found myself booting up that crummy player over and over to listen to it more, I would go buy the CD.
In fact, the very crappiness of their software further incentivized me to actually buy the m
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Never used it. But... (Score:4, Insightful)
A bad business model usually causes a company to fail, even more then the quality of their product. The WMA DRM is really not a big deal. Perhaps the quality of their software my be a larger factor. But I would say having a smaller amount of tracks available then iTunes, and that it was Targeted toward College students a group who is more willing to pirate music of their colleges high speed internet, with a since of entitlement as they are paying so much for college and everyone is telling them that they will be the leaders of tomorrow, and probably the only sector which would have real issues of WMA,DRM,and Poor quality software.
Re:Never used it. But... (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Never used it. But... (Score:5, Funny)
"Remember WMA DRM = Doesn't work on iPods."
lol, everyone uses Zunes, who cares about iPod. Also everyone uses Internet Explorer. And Windows.
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"Remember WMA DRM = Doesn't work on iPods."
lol, everyone uses Zunes, who cares about iPod. Also everyone uses Internet Explorer. And Windows.
It didn't work on Zunes either
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everyone uses Zunes
not on 2008-12-31 they didn't :-)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zune#Zune_30_leap_year_bug [wikipedia.org]
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Over half the world's population owns an iPod? Really? Wow. I guess we're beating all those global poverty and hunger issues, huh?
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But then again, WMA DRM = Works in Windows PCs without installing additional software, + it also works in almost any music player except an iPod (eventually, I don't know if they only support non-DRMed WMA or not.), with DRMed AAC you're stuck with iPod. So I know which one I'd prefer of these two bad Apples.
Re:Never used it. But... (Score:4, Insightful)
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You still have to install a newer version of Windows Media Player than the default. On XP it comes with WMP 6.4 which doesn't have a lot of functionality. WMA DRM works on a lot of different PMPs; however, it doesn't work equally well on all of them or as well as FairPlay works with iPod. That's the main reason the iPod is more popular; it just works.
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Every version of XP I've seen comes with either WMP9 or WMP10.
You still have to install a newer version of Windows Media Player than the default. On XP it comes with WMP 6.4 which doesn't have a lot of functionality. WMA DRM works on a lot of different PMPs; however, it doesn't work equally well on all of them or as well as FairPlay works with iPod. That's the main reason the iPod is more popular; it just works.
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Because you can't upgrade WMP in XP? Sounds weird ... I call bullshit.
http://www.microsoft.com/windows/windowsmedia/player/11/default.aspx [microsoft.com]
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So why are you writing "buy a new copy" then, and who cares if you have to update WMP. First version of XP is what, 8 years old? Boho, you need to update a piece of software on it! Omg!
You don't need to buy it, guess what, we don't give a shit, if you don't want it or don't want to play WMA, don't get it. But for most Windows users updating Windows is less of a step than getting iTunes.
But I guess you also want Safari and Quicktime and whatever else crap Apple feels like putting in the iTunes installation b
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No offense, but what on Earth are you smoking?
If you bought an OEM or retail copy of Windows XP Pro or Home you have a license. You are not limited to that install disk, or even the original computer. Microsoft sometimes screws it up a little depending on if you are using an install disk that did not come with your original certific
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Actually, no. You can use nlite to take your current CD, slipstream SP2 and 3 into it, and even pre-install drivers/software (like WMP). Yes, it will take some time downloading the files, and even a small amount of technical knowledge. You can have a computer-techy friend do it, or have a computer store do it (at a cost less than buying a "new" copy of XP).
Even if you didn't want to go through all the above, you could just download the latest WMP from MS and install it (as others had mentioned), and it w
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For me the Cowon S9/Archos 5/... would "just work" better, no need for iTunes and no need to convert those DivX clips...
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I fired it up, downloaded a few songs, listened to them, noticed they were low-quality WMA files, and then uninstalled Ruckus and replaced it with Limewire.
Pity. Nice concept, bad execution.
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It's probably hard to get a bigger catalogue than the biggest name in the business don't you think?
Also I've never bought music online and never signed up for iTunes store, so for me less choices than iTunes wouldn't matter because FREE > PAID.
But yes, I can get more tunes than iTunes has to, and still free, so ..
Next up: (Score:2)
As for Ruckus specifically, no "playsforsure. hurr, hurr" joke seems quite lame enough. The only real surprise is that they lasted this long, with iTunes and Amazon on one side, and Pandora on the other.
Dominated by streaming services (Score:5, Interesting)
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!
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...streaming music providers like deezer [slashdot.org]...
You can't do that, dave.
Another music service bites the dust (Score:4, Insightful)
FTA:
Quick, listen to your music before it expires!
Also, the article suggests that Total Music (which recently acquired Ruckus, and was a joint venture between Sony and UM) still has some life in it, but this article [techcrunch.com] (on the same site!) says otherwise and quotes the blog [blogspot.com] of a VP there. I guess these record labels are having a hard time with this stuff...
First time I ever heard of it (Score:3, Informative)
If it was aimed at college students, they did a poor job of advertising it (using Pandora here).
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The way they advertised it here on my campus, you'd think you'd get expelled by just mentioning the words "sharing". Maybe even "fair use".
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I wouldn't know about it either, except my brother's university had signed a deal so everyone was required to use Ruckus. So I think it was less targeted at individual users, and more targeted at universities looking for a reasonable way to let their students have music, but still be able to enforce a strict policy on filesharing.
And looked at it that way, it's kind of like a less sketchy version of the filesharing tax.
My uni apparently didn't get the memo (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
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I work for a medium-sized University and I'm curious what the CIO is going to say about this. He's the one who pushed the Ruckus thing through on our campus and I suspect this'll lead to a bit of egg on his face.
I dunno, I guess I was just uncomfortable with the thought of putting all of my eggs (my music library) into one basket. (The Ruckus DRM servers)
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Cornell is one of the universities that promoted Ruckus. The main student-run newspaper had an article on it today [cornellsun.com] where they say their interviewers asking about the university's response was the first the university officials had heard of the news.
Point of Awareness (Score:2, Informative)
DRM + ads (Score:4, Funny)
Wait, wait, wait, so you're saying that this store combines DRM and ads? Wow!
And their range is a fraction of iTunes', which is a fraction of the pirate bay's, you say? Cool!
What's that? The store client is buggy, and there's only one type of uncommonly used proprietary format? No shit!
Oh and you say it closed down? I wonder why something like that would happen...
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Re:DRM + ads + FREE MUSIC (Score:2)
DRM + ads = free music, which is fantastic
Keep in mind, the Apple Store also uses ads and DRM, albeit not as much anymore. The only real problems with Ruckus had to do with the poor client software (which wasn't that buggy, it just had a poor layout).
I used Ruckus (Score:2)
Where did Ruckus fail?
-Ads were probably not sufficient to cover the cost of everything. My ad blocker detected Ruckus and removed all of the ads from the interface.
-The client was beyond buggy. Many times, licenses for songs wouldn't renew at all. I could redownload
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Agreed. I too used it to assess albums for purchase and am sad to see it is gone. I think the summary is biased even by Slashdot standards.
I'm not surprised to see it failed though, I'm surprised it lasted this long. (And I enjoyed the ability to trial music from them for as long as they lasted).
Hmmm... (Score:2)
".wma-only DRM-laden catalog..."
Ah, a single file format and DRM. This would explain iTunes' failures in the past.
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Good Riddance (Score:1)
Simply trying to download an album from their selection would usually reveal that several tracks were missing. In my brief time using it, I found very few complete albums. I had wondered if this was a copyright issue with certain songs, but I discovered that some of the missing songs from albums were present on compi
What took so long? (Score:3, Informative)
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And don't forget that there were numerous songs that were simply unavailable on certain albums. Particularly notorious cases would let you download 3 unpopular songs from an album, but the rest would be unavailable.
It was pretty ridiculous
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Seriously? If you really use Linux, you should know how to remove DRM by now.
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iTunes no longer has that issue (Score:2)
iTunes, on the other hand, is a terrible concept (pay for music that isn't compatible with anything and may not work in 15 years)
iTunes is now DRM free (a few straggling tracks have not yet made it).
AAC is an open format. In addition to the iPod (of course), there are a lot of other devices that support AAC (including the Zune). Now that iTunes is DRM free you should see the device count skyrocket.
You'll be playing AAC for decades or eons to come, not just fifteen years...
As always, it was the labels that