Music Service Ruckus Goes Silent

Music service Ruckus once tried to cater to students by offering all the music they could handle while they were enrolled...but now it's quietly said goodbye.

Music service Ruckus tried to nip campuses’ fears of file-sharing and copyright infringement lawsuits in the bud by offering colleges and universities a way to give students legitimate access to all the music (and even music video) they could consume at a reasonable cost and in a way that would keep all the media traffic on campus networks rather than saturate Internet connections.

The problem, of course, was that once students graduated, they couldn’t take their Ruckus-acquired music with them, leading students to eschew Ruckus and similar services in favor of (you guessed it) good old fashioned file-sharing and CD-ripping—or even buying music from legitimate sources like iTunes. But, despite throwing open its service to all students with valid .edu addresses in 2007, Ruckus has finally thrown in the towel, quietly (and suddenly) shutting down service over the weekend.

According to sources at campuses which offered the Ruckus service, it appears campuses were not notified of the shutdown. Ruckus’s parent company TotalMusic, a joint venture of Sony BMG and Universal Music Group, recently laid off a number of employees, including senior managers, and the two music executives who led the operation left the company in recent months.