Ruckus: When “Free Music” Can’t Compete With Free Music
[via ars]
The Ruckus music service shut down over the weekend, raising the question of whether universities are done offering sponsored legal download services to students.
The music industry, struggling to find workable business models for the digital age, apparently can’t even give its product away. Ad-supported services like SpiralFrog have generated what can only be charitably called a “lack of enthusiasm,” while another ad-supported service called Ruckus just shut its virtual doors this weekend. Such services were once held up as the answer to (first) collegiate music piracy and (eventually) to music piracy in general, but the ridiculous encumbrances offered by DRM helped ensure that neither solution proved compelling.
Legal music subscription services once looked like a possible way of dealing with campus copyright infringement; if students were simply given the music, why would they continue torrenting? But initial experiments with paid sites like the revamped Napster generated an outcry as students objected to having their school fees used to pay for services that many did not want or could not use.
Ruckus looked like an incredible solution.
Read the full story here.
This entry was posted on Tuesday, February 10th, 2009 at 10:26 pm. It is filed under wax and tagged with download, free, p2p, ruckus, torrent, websites.
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