Friday, February 27, 2009

Ruckus is No More

I don't know how many of you knew about Ruckus, but I loved it. It was a ad-supported site where college students had access to legally download over 3 million songs and all for free! It was great, especially for poor college students, and greatly decreased illegal file sharing. The only thing is that the songs were DRM protected, so you could not transfer them off your computer and on to your iPod or other portable music player. While this was kind of sad, it was still nice to get this free music. That is, until the unexpected happened.

A friend of mine was telling me about this group that she really liked, but I had not heard of them. Naturally I thought, "Hey, I'll just look them up on Ruckus." Unfortunately when I went to the site, it said that the service will no longer be provided. I was shocked. I didn't see this coming. It happened without any warning at all. I checked to see if my music that I already downloaded still worked. Some of it did, and some of it didn't. With this service, you had to renew your license to each song each month. All you had to do was sign into your account, and it would automatically renew them. Once the site shut down, you could no longer sign into your account. This means that once the license is up, the songs can no longer be played.

This all happened about a month ago, so the rest of my songs will expire on March 3rd. This makes for a very sad day. I have kept a list of the songs that I have now, so hopefully I will be able to find them somewhere else. Maybe I'll just break down and buy the CDs on ebay, Amazon, or another site where I can get them cheaply. If anyone knows of another site where you can download free and legal music, I would greatly appreciate it if you let me know about it.

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