Ruckus, an online music service geared towards universities that allows students to stream an unlimited amount of music, has apparently just closed its doors. The service was designed to appeal to college students, offering a legal alternative to the piracy that can be found on many campuses. Ruckus was initially offered as a subscription service, then eventually moved to an ad-supported model with partnerships with dozens of major universities. Eventually it opened to all students with an accepted university email address (typically .edu).
At around 5 PM EST today the site went down with a notice stating that it was undergoing an update. As of 5:30, it was displaying the shutdown notice seen above.
We’re told that music that has not passed its “renew date” still works, but that music that has expired will no longer work because the DRM licensing server has apparently shut down.
Last year Ruckus was acquired by Total Music, the joint venture between Sony and UMG, with the intention of using it as a backend for a service which still has yet to launch. Total Music has been struggling for some time – we hear that it made a strong pitch to provide Facebook’s music service, but that it was eventually denied when the social network was unwilling to share revenue and user data, which would have been part of the deal (Total Music was also unable to get Warner, the last major label holdout, to agree to participate in the venture).
While Ruckus’ closure certainly doesn’t bode well for the initiative, Total Music doesn’t seem dead quite yet. Last month it quietly launched a site called Tunepost in private beta, which seems to offer streaming music through a widget.
DRM is dead! Long may it rest.
Keep talking
I use Inkscape (free, cross-platform, and open source) for working with vector graphics.
Doing bitmap-to-vector tracing *well* is a hard problem. I use Vector Magic to do that (and that’s all it does). It has both a web version and a desktop version.
http://tinyurl.com/ahzvtb
Um, did you guys actually check the web site listed in the profile you provide for Rukus? It’s up and running and looks fine to me at ruckusnetwork.com
If you go to ruckus.com it redirects you to ruckus.net where you get that message. Unless you have some independent confirmation, I’d say someone let a domain expire and punked the site (and you all).
Um, did you, guy, actually check any of the links from ruckusnetwork.com? The Ruckus site IS shut down. Only the ‘blog’ remains.
Sorry, I didn’t realize I needed to do fact checking for TechCrunch. I did click a few of the links, just not the ones that take you to the down message. And I’m still waiting for something more official then “my catsitter’s boyfriend’s dogwalker’s uncle told me that Rukus is shutting down.” If there is a release, link to it. If they have word from someone in the company, say so. And “we’re told” doesn’t count.
Funny, but Ruckus is dead. Unless it’s going to reemerge as a mail order site, it’s done.
Scroll up this Techcrunch page, to where it says the following, and click the Website link. You don’t need to do anything else.
Website: ruckusnetwork.com
Location: United States
I have no idea what you’re talking about.
I was desperate for my music back, and
found this site on google. That’s the only
way I was able to find out the alternative
site.
There better be a good reason for this! I have a lot of good music i got from their servers and I still want it!
Also my school being on the top 10 list for RIAA most wanted is now screwed…
“This will not stand, ya know, this aggression will not stand, man.”
And that’s why FrostWire rules
yes while ruckusnetwork.com does still work, when you try and type in a music search it brings you to that page saying the ruckus service will no longer be offered, and then all other related links on the page are shut down and bring you to page that says the page is no longer available.
Ruckus is dead
Is this true or not? Two of my business school classmates started this company, so I hope it is not true. Does anyone know the acquisition price paid by Total Music Group? I hope my classmates made something given all of the work they put into this…
Update: I cant login into my account and the site obviously isnt owned by them anymore, maybe it did get punked? Doubt it though…Only time will tell!
If this group reaches 1,000,000 visitors, my girlfriend will…
SLAP!
Bye Ruckus!
Ruckus was great… especially combined with FairUse4WM
RIP
First of all . . . the wording seems really weird to be legit. Additionally, if you take a look at the code, it’s not only minimal, but the closing header tag is malformed.
Seems a bit sketchy to me.
Hmmmm. . . .could you name one thing about the Ruckus website that would lead you to believe it’s code was not malformed to begin with?
I don’t know if I can live with myself anymore… Ruckus was a lifetime’s supply of music and, although I capitalized quite nicely… reverting back to limewire WILL NOT CUT IT!!!
I couldn’t agree more.
NOOOOOOOO
Ruckusnetwork.com just went offline within the last few minutes and displays the same image.
FWIW: It also has the same tagging mistakes in the heading tag.
Hopefully it’s a hacking, not real, but I wouldn’t hold my breath.
Oh mama…help please.
this just really sux…. i’m glad i updated the licenses for the ones i had 2 days ago. =(
No joke, no hacking, it’s dead, Jim.
Does anyone know of a different free music provider to use in stead (other than spiral frog)?
Wow, Total Music acquired Ruckus and shut it down. Does anyone know how much it was acquired for? Also, Ruckus burned $41.5 M. I can’t believe how much these VCs can burn on stupid startups.
Dammit!! Where’m I gonna get My Meat Puppet music Now?!
Are these motherfuckers fucking high?!?!?!?!
A couple of months back wasn’t Ruckus begging for it’s users to find new accounts for them? If I remember correctly, they wanted us to reel in new users and my guess is to click more ads. Maybe they just went broke?
Are there any alternatives?
I guess all the people using Firefox and Ad Block Plus dried up Ruckus’ advertising revenue.
Either that or Sony finally figured out that most students were using FairUse4WM or tunebite to remove the drm.
I am happy that I have kept all my music liesnce up to date but i am sadden by the Ruckus choice to shut down during these hard times. I guess that why when i charged my mp4 all the songs from ruckus went in and i was like wtf. now i have to find another non bs site. anyone have any suggestions. Post em below
i see you are also a user of ruckus Please join the face book group to try to get ruckus back or atleast in a app format!
http://www.face...gid=53816331262
Once again DRM shows that it’s only good to screw the customer.
Now, this is really sad. Maybe this is not the end, maybe there will be another form?
There undoubtedly *will* be another form with its own DRM scheme. And when that goes under and takes all your music with it, there will be *another* form. LOL!
Did anyone ever believe that people who are too cheap to buy music would generate enough click-through revenues to be worth a damn? “Gee Ed, I got an idea, lets target a demographic that hates to spend money, what an angle!” ROFL!
Alright, so here’s the way I see it; Ruckus was nothing more than an experiment by the major record companies to determine what people were interested in listening too. I mean think about it, how much marketing research could you get out of watching what people listen to when and how often. Regions would be profiled and consequently radion stations could be retailored.
A bit paranoid I must admit, but I really can’t come up with a better explanation other than that. Remember the old addage, “There’s no such thing as a free lunch?” Well, Ruckus was no exception to the rule.
I am going to be very sad to see Ruckus go whether is was a marketing research experiment or truly a quest into what the web was originally envisioned as. I suppose I will have to move on to better things like I-Tunes. However, Ruckus, you will always have a special place in my heart.
>Remember the old addage, “There’s no such thing as a free lunch?” Well, Ruckus was no exception to the rule.
That’s less true than it ever was now. Ruckus wasn’t selling music to customers, they were selling ad space to vendors. The music was just the bait to get people to install their program, which was really just a vehicle for ads.
We might have been getting music for free, but there was still money changing hands. Not enough, it looks like, but still some.
Enderle is astonishing. He has spent decades issuing authoritative pronouncements of Apple’s demise, only to have to eat his words later. You’d think he’d be a little embarrassed by now. I wish he’d make stock market pronouncements as well. Then we’d all know how to invest (just do the opposite of what he advises). I’d be a multimillionaire by now.
“Rob Enderle in January 2007, on DRM music subscription service Ruckus:
As these students leave school, much like it was for the Mac, they are more likely to not want to support Apple and if Ruckus continues to expand, that represents a long term downward trend to both iTunes and the iPod unless Apple moves directly to provide a similar service and address the need that Ruckus is addressing.
Granted this will take several years to develop and probably won’t become pronounced until 2009 or later but this is how a monopoly is typically taken down, by eating away at the fringes and, in this case, drilling holes in the future market by attacking successfully young consumers.”
Enderle is astonishing. He has spent decades issuing authoritative pronouncements of Apple’s demise, only to have to eat his words later. You’d think he’d be a little embarrassed by now. I wish he’d make stock market pronouncements as well. Then we’d all know how to invest (just do the opposite of what he advises). I’d be a multimillionaire by now.
what about ourstage.com ? is the site still exist ?
I’m saddened by the death of ruckus, but I’m not surprised. Everyone in my dorm used it to get music, but this likely didn’t help ruckus make any money. You see, the ruckus music player was so absolutely unusable that everyone, and I mean everyone, would use an application like tunebite so they could play the music in iTunes.
In addition to this, the ruckus website was absolutely horrible. Say you wanted a particular miles davis song. You search for “song name miles davis” and get no results. You search for “song name” and get too many results to start browsing through. Then you search for “miles davis” and you’re greeted with his collection of 50 CD’s. So what one ends up doing is using iTMS or Amazon to find the song, then returning to the ruckus website to download it. (After which you use tunebite so you can listen to it in iTunes.)
Plus the ruckus service had this odd thing where certain tracks were only available when you downloaded the entire CD. This would makes sense if we were purchasing the CD. But we weren’t, we were downloading it for free. So you’d select all tracks, thereby thinking you were downloading the entire CD, but not all tracks would get downloaded. There was a trick to it, where you had to jump through hoops, in order to download the songs you wanted.
On top of all of this, the ads on the site were so annoying that they would actually expand when your mouse got close to them, thereby blocking everything you were trying to do. You would click close on the ad, only to have it expand and get in your way again. Ultimately, one of the tech savvy users on our floor helped everyone install ad-blockers in our browser so the ads wouldn’t get in our way anymore…
It may or may not be the case that a service like ruckus can never make it. But it is certainly the case that a service as poorly executed as ruckus probably won’t survive.
Your blog is super. So are your photographies. They make me hungry. I have spent a nice moment when seeing them. Thanks a lot.
A pretty cool called songraptor.com might be a good fix for those who liked Ruckus
The loss of any of the new digital models is always sad but this again shows the clear issue of the economics in the industry.
The music industry has moved positively in the last 12 months and are much more supportive but there is still a long way to go. The fact is that the economics of ad funding does not fit any existing music model and the ability to match what advertisers will pay to what rights owners, labels and collection societies want are worlds apart.
The penny still hasn’t fully dropped and that the internet is about scale and micropayments. The economic unit of music will be the ‘listen’ which can be tracked and reported. Ad funded models can work and can be made to be significantly profitable if allowed to scale.
It is always possible to sell £20m of advertising at the right price and nothing at the wrong price and the world needs to understand that advertisers have choices.
At We7 where we do Great Music for Free; we have been ‘battling’ this challenge for a while particularly focussing on the UK, and continue to do well with great support from Labels, massive growth in music fans and visibility starting to show with advertisers but there is enough proof out there that the rates are wrong unless its via an ‘illegal’ approach which effectively ’stuffs’ the artists.
Free and Legal Music can be made to be profitable but more acceptance of working economic models has to happen.
Cheers
Steve
Steve Purdham CEO We7
Great Free Music from We7
Not even valid html.
Ruckus
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Not even valid html.
Who cares?? No you’ll all go out and buy music on iTunes. Everything is proceeding according to plan.
Take your iPod and that’s it
So much for the iTunes killer.
Ruckus, sounds great.
good to know about this.
What was good in past should be helped to survive. Right?
A shame that Total Music Rockus has not been saved and many more which have not had the intelligence to sell to companies that have expanded and made use of their exact function as a social network like Facebook or the other company that represents a giant warner within the industry.