By Lisa DiCarlucci
University students who have grown accustomed to ruckus.com’s free music services are now out of luck. Ruckus shut down opperations permanently last Friday evening. The Web site displayed a graphic which read, “Unfortunately the Ruckus service will no longer be provided. Thanks.” Users were left wondering what went wrong.
Ruckus, originally a subscription service, most recently allowed college students with legitimate e-mail addresses to stream unlimited amounts of music and keep a library of all the songs they collected to play at their leisure. While the song files could not be transferred to an external device such as an iPod, the service was still valuable to students.
According to an article on techcrunch.com, “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 however, has not been doing well for some time now.
Ruckus simply wasn’t generating the income necessary to keep it running. The service was free and fairly unlimited, however the incompatibility with mp3 devices and the limited selection of music made the Web site unappealing to many.