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Ruckus Closes Down

Posted by timothy on from the long-overdue dept.

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."

6 of 125 comments (clear)

  1. Uhhhh.....free? by martin_henry · · 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.

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    1. Re:Uhhhh.....free? by morgan_greywolf · · Score: 3, Insightful

      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.

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  2. Never used it. But... by jellomizer · · Score: 3, 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.

     

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    1. Re:Never used it. But... by fuzzyfuzzyfungus · · Score: 3, Insightful

      I'm no fan of DRM period(and, running Linux, it isn't as though either DRM system supported me). In this case, though, Ruckus had a (terrible) client even though Windows supports WMA DRM by default, so that was no advantage.

  3. Another music service bites the dust by Dekortage · · Score: 3, Insightful

    FTA:

    music that has not passed its âoerenew dateâ still works... music that has expired will no longer work because the DRM licensing server has apparently shut down.

    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...

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  4. Re:First time I ever heard of it by FlyingBishop · · Score: 2, Insightful

    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.