Free music website shut down Friday

Ruckus, the university's music service that provided students with a legal and free way to listen to music on their computers, shut down late Friday evening.

The Ruckus Network Inc.'s website simply displays a message saying "unfortunately the Ruckus service will no longer be provided."

"We just learned this morning that the Ruckus service has ended," Phyllis Dickerson Johnson, director of communications for the university's Office of Information Technology, said Monday. She added the university did not receive any kind of notification from the company that it would no longer be available to students.

Ruckus could not be reached for comment.

There were 11,300 subscribers to the Ruckus service at the university, Dickerson Johnson said. But many students said they were either unaware of the program or didn't use it.

"There's plenty of ways to get music. You don't need Ruckus," Vinay Mehar, a sophomore engineering major, said.

The basic music service did not allow users to transfer music to transportable music players or burn CDs and is not compatible with Mac computers, limiting its uses and its popularity.

"You spend time downloading it, and it's just on your computer, and you can't do anything with it," said Mokshya Sharma, a junior physics major.

Adam Wilner, a sophomore government and politics and philosophy major, said he used Ruckus last year but forgot about it over the summer. He now just uses iTunes and suggested the university offer free iTunes downloads to students.

The university already has a relationship with iTunes since it began using iTunes U two years ago, but iTunes U supplies university- and academic-related content, not music, Dickerson Johnson said.

The Ruckus service provided over 3 million songs to users who registered with their school e-mail address. The company also offered a subscription-based service called Ruckus-To-Go, which allowed users to download songs to a portable player for $20 per term. Users could also purchase individual tracks for 79 to 99 cents and albums for about $9.99.

Dickerson Johnson said because the music service ended without notice, OIT has just begun evaluating what its next step could be in finding another way to provide legal music to students.

Ruckus was the only free and legal, ad-supported entertainment service designed just for college students. Prior to Ruckus, the university used the Cdigix digital music service from spring 2005 until spring 2007, when the company withdrew from the market, according to OIT. A few months later, the university began its agreement with Ruckus.

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