Slashdot Mirror
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. That service was appalling.
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.
Ride the skies
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.
www.purevolume.com/martyd
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.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
Can the notion that colleges and universities need to pay protection money(I mean, pay for a campus wide site licence to one of the valuable premium content subscription services) lest they be sued for something their students do die in a fire now? Please?
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.
I used Ruckus when it came out as my music provider, but moved to streaming music providers like deezer 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!
Atheist: Buddhist in a Prius
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 (on the same site!) says otherwise and quotes the blog of a VP there. I guess these record labels are having a hard time with this stuff...
$nice = $webHosting + $domainNames + $sslCerts
If it was aimed at college students, they did a poor job of advertising it (using Pandora here).
ooops, i submitted as html instead of text and it missed my
I wish this story would get some mainstream ink; it would hopefully give the free-as-in-X discussion a little more mindshare.
My turnips listen for the soft cry of your love
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.
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.
The Record industry should look at Ruckus and realize that its not free music that people pirate. It is the convenience of pirated music that they want. The Record industry just needs to think and not use DRM.
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...
so why are we talking shit on apple iTunes only to turn around and use them as a referencing benchmake for even a library of songs? iTunes sucks. Go to Bleep.com and get music you didnt even know you liked!
I'm sad Ruckus is gone. The catalog was actually pretty good, and had most of the (Mainstream) music I'd listen to. It was handy to hear decent (192KBPS WMA) quality copies of entire tracks- I used it to assess multiple albums for purchase.
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 them, wasting their bandwidth, but I couldn't use a few KB and renew the licenses.
-It was utterly incompatible with the iPod or the Zune as PlaysForSure DRM was used. If you were adept you could use Tunebite (Fairuse4WM used to work), but the quality wasn't as good as iTunes Plus.
-There was a smaller catalog than iTunes. Part of the reason was track restrictions. Say, Stadium Arcadium by the Red Hot Chili Peppers. You could download the whole album EXCEPT Dani California and Stadium Arcadium, the two album singles (I don't remember if it was the RHCP album I was thinking of). I remember finding albums with less than 1/2 their tracks downloadable.
It provided a legal avenue to listen to whole songs, and if you used an older WMA player, essentially "free" music while you were in college. I think it was a worthwhile experiment. Ruckus' death blow was opening up to all US universities; previously, the universities that offered it basically paid Ruckus.
Uncle Ruckus knows whose fault it is that such a nice company went under. Marks Uncle Ruckus' words, its those hoodlums with their pirate pods and stealing and singing about 'beetches'. Uh-huh.
Look at the bright side of this; for all the college students that used the service, this is free education in the perils of allowing DRM in your life.
".wma-only DRM-laden catalog..."
Ah, a single file format and DRM. This would explain iTunes' failures in the past.
deleting the extra space after periods so i can stay relevant, yeah.
I tried it a few years back in college. I loved the concept but the execution was lacking. It was slow, hard to use, and not compatible with anything else. 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) with a brilliant execution.
I don't buy through iTunes, and I didn't use ruckus.
While the article metnions the awful client software and (easily bypassed, but still annoying) DRM and WMA format, perhaps my greatest issues with it were the metadata and album completion.
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 compilation albums by the same artist.
Once you had perhaps piecemealed an album together from Ruckus's offerings, the metadata was often horrible. Even without assembling an album from different tracks, I found that songs from an album would have different album titles, incorrect song names, missing or incorrect track numbers, or sometimes even the incorrect artist. I would often have to correct the metadata on a file-by-file basis instead of trying to identify what song it really was in my Winamp music library.
The fact that the organization no longer exists comes as no surprise to me.
They also infamously exploited the beginnings of global groups on Facebook (remember they used to be network-only) to make the face group claiming that if it got 100 thousand members (or one million, I'm not sure) the guy's girlfriend would have a threesome. The traffic alone was a story, and eventually Facebook shut it down after it was uncovered as a marketing scheme for Ruckus.
http://www.karyhead.com/2006/09/13/brody-ruckus-marketing-scam/
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 they are driven to be on your side. You just have to know what they consider profitable to understand if the actions they take will be agreeable to you.
Also, you made that last part up completely.
He described how the system actually works, rather the opposite from "made up".
Explain how a DRM scheme works that doesn't require some verification system, please I'd love to know.
See, here's the part where you need to learn to read more carefully. He didn't say there was no verification system, just that once you bought the music it did not need to contact Apple to work (and here we are talking about the legacy DRM music stuff, not the majority of Apple's music which is now DRM free).
The reason is that with the Apple DRM, your whole computer is authorized to play the DRM files you receive from Apple.
Thus you can buy a song, it's downloaded to your computer with the DRM wrapped around tailored to the authorization from your computer. You can play the audio/video file until the end of time with no network connection. If you like, you can think of it as your own computer being the authorization server.
Similarily, devices are authorized and the same holds true there - music sent to your device works there as well indefinitely, with no network connection.
Apple saves a ton of headaches and money not having a DRM authorization server that has to be up 24/7 in order for people's music/video to work, by authorizing up front they scale the load back to a single effort instead of repeated requests (almost true, since of course from time to time you may need to authorize a new computer or device but it's still basically O(1)). There's that whole "company saving money is the same as your best interests" thing again.
The patronizing tone of this reply is brought to you by the arrogant tone of yours.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
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 bullshit and claim you legally "bought" 3 million songs for $10. No, you have a copy of the song for which the artist got nothing. Now perhaps they suck or they do not deserve money for some other reason, but do not justify it as a transaction where you are wholly in the right.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
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 brought us the sucking aspects of the service. Now that they have been strong-armed into doing what is right and also what is best in terms of sales, the concept is free to play itself out as it should unfettered by many technical concerns (though I'll bet we don't see unprotected wireless song device sharing for a good long while yet).
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
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 far and away the most popular mp3 players.
-you had to pay to put the songs on an mp3 player that *did* support FairUse4WM (it was something like $5 a semester, but still)
-the music catalog was labeled terribly and frequently had mislabeled tracks or albums, and albums were often missing songs. (Whoever marked albums with the explicit tag also apparently decided it was a fun idea to go through and mark about a third of the purely instrumental music 'explicit', which was really quite obnoxious.)
I had one friend who still used it, I think. She's sorry to see it go, but I don't know of anybody else who was.
So, to summarize: I'm just about as close to the opposite of an Apple fanboy as one can get, but when I saw that article summary I just nodded my head in agreement.
I'm sure all five users will be severely disappointed.
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
I'm surprised it took this long for them to die. When I was a senior in college (3 years ago), Ruckus was introduced on my campus to help combat all of the piracy. It was dead on arrival. Everyone with an iPod saw the lack of support, shrugged, and then returned to their iTunes or piracy. Those like myself (no iPod, but running Linux)saw the lack of Linux support and the oodles of DRM and shouted "NO FUCKING WAY!" to anyone thinking about using it. Anyone who actually got to the part of trying to use it, gave up quickly after messing with the awful client software and realizing all of the limitations that the DRM provided. They handed us shit on a silver platter and called it a free lunch, but no one was interested.
"It's not whether you win or lose, it's how drunk you get." -- H. J. Simpson
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).