Ruckus

In an effort to curb music and movie piracy, my school, along with some 80 other colleges and universities across the country, partnered with Ruckus Network. This new service is a somewhat free (we’ll get to that part) music download program aimed at college students.

At first glance, Ruckus seems to be a golden bridge between the broke college students that compromise a big chunk of the P2P community and the money hungry and often sue-happy music industry; possibly ending the insane amount of lawsuits due to pirated material. As it only requires a valid email address ending in '.edu,' Ruckus can be accessed by virtually any college student, and there are unlimited free downloads provided on their network (which boasts a sizable collection of over 3 million files). Ruckus also attempts to edge out piracy by providing additional features such as playlist sharing between friends right out of the box. While all may seem good and well, there are many restrictions that cripple the system’s efficiency and popularity.

For starters, Ruckus music files are DRM’d, preventing transfer to most major mp3 players (such as the iPod and iriver). Essentially, this means that the only difference between Ruckus and internet radio is whatever amount of space the encrypted material takes up in the user's hard drive.  In fact, the only program that is able to play Ruckus's mp3s is Microsoft’s (coincidentally titled) PlayForSure, which, with Microsoft being the way it is, is completely incompatible with its own line of mp3 players, the Zune.  

The network's availability of albums has also been reported to be inconsistent. Along with that, Ruckus also lacks a definite naming convention and track number system for files, altogether rendering it a subpar music organization network.

Another downfall of Ruckus is that it has tried too hard to come off as “cool” to college students. In a failed viral marketing attempt, Ruckus attempted to create the single largest group on Facebook as a marketing tool.  As you might expect, however, getting through to the millions of users on Facebook is no easy task if you only offer marketing and a service that doesn't seem to bring anything major to the table compared to straight up piracy.  Well, in a stroke of genius, the Ruckus advertisement team created a group called "If this group reaches 100,000 my girlfriend will have a threesome" under a cleverly named alias, Brody Ruckus.  Predictably, the member count rose above 100,000 within 7 days. The escapade didn't end there however, as Brody Ruckus then promised to post pictures of his sexual exploits if the group went over 300,000. Again, this criteria was filled within days. Brody then proceeded to mislead another some hundred thousand sexually-deprived students with the promise of juicy threesome .avi pr0n in order to make his group the largest on Facebook.  This was removed after Facebook’s admins discovered (to their dismay, I'm sure) that the whole thing was a hoax and the porn was a lie.

With Ruckus’s credibility called into question so early, I have to say I’m rather wary of installing whatever software it needs to get music. So far it seems like whatever benefits Ruckus offers is outweighed by their limited options of what users can do with their downloaded music.  Although Ruckus is a good step forward in the cooperation of music pirates and the record industries, right now it just doesn't seem good enough.

My prediction on Ruckus is that sometime in the future, one of them college kids is going to develop a hack program to remove whatever DRM’s get tacked on audio files, essentially turning the service into a piracy equivalent. Ideally this will be within the next four years, so I’ll be able to enjoy some of the cake. One can always hope.