No More (Legally) Free Music?

Want to download a ton of (good) music for free and legally and super quickly? Forget iTunes – Ruckus is the way to go.

Or, at least, it was up until yesterday.

The only thing you'll see on Ruckus' website as of February 6, 2009.

Back when I first started going to GMU, it was advertised in just about every housing unit on campus that there was a way for students to obtain music for free which was also legal. As it turned out, GMU had recently partnered with The Ruckus Network, which released the Ruckus program and gave students (or anyone whose school participated and had a .edu e-mail address) free and fast access to a plethora of music and even some movies (only downloadable and viewable on campus).

The Ruckus program works in such a way that students can get free music but cannot transfer the digitally protected files to an external mp3 player (like an iPod) without paying a monthly fee for that service. It seemed like a feasible option for those of us with an mp3 player, considering that we weren’t paying anything for Ruckus’ music in the first place,  until I read through the specifications: the user needed to have a Microsoft PlaysForSure player to even be able to play the files.  Users were pretty much limited to playing the music on their computers (which you could only log into the Ruckus program on two of at a time) Furthermore, the second computer’s login would prevent the first from being able to log in and update licenses for existing songs for 30 days.

PROS AND CONS OF RUCKUS:

Pros

• Super fast download speed
• Free
• Huge collection to choose from
• Relatively minimal access restrictions
• Easy to use

Cons

• Ads everywhere that would popup on mouseovers
• Only able to use program on Windows-based machines
• Fee to transfer already digitally protected files to a very limited list of compatible players
• Have to renew licenses of music downloaded every three weeks (which you can’t do unless you’re logged in)

There were a couple of other downsides to the way Ruckus had set up its player, though, chiefly that it would only work on Windows compatible machines – not Apple computers or machines using the Linux operating system.  And while their music library boasted around 3 million files, it was still only half of what the iTunes store has, which made finding that Econoline Crush album and a little difficult. However, they did have some music by bands that were even sometimes difficult to find online illegally, like Nurse With Wound, theSTART, Celldweller and 8mm, to name a few.

Overall, the Ruckus program was based on a pretty good model: provide a bunch of free but digitally protected music to students (and faculty and alumni) that is transferrable for a fee to compatible players with a few restrictions that are outweighed by the convenience and quality of the music (and movies) made available, and with a major source of revenue being generated from ads.

Ruckus’ technical support system was also pretty good – they had a really efficient ticket system and usually resolved issues either the same day they were submitted or the next day. And the tech support people answering the tickets would either link you an article where the answer had already been submitted or they would answer your question/resolve the issue themselves. It was fantastic, considering that one of my computers wouldn’t let me log in to Ruckus, even though it had been a little longer than 30 days that I had logged in on the new computer.

However, there may be hope, as TechCrunch mentioned the Ruckus Facebook application’s notice on Facebook:

Ruckus had to shut down the party due to over crowdedness. Please rock out to some music and we’ll get the party going again shortly.

Here’s hoping – I’m crossing my fingers.