In yet another attempt to force college students to stop downloading, the music filesharing service Ruckus has introduced yet another platform into the fray. You can download music onto your desktop for free, and share it with friends too, all legally. The catch? If you want to move your music off of your desktop and onto a mobile player, you have to pay. And it's not compatible with iPod. And the music, of course, is encoded with DRM.
The popularity of downloaded music is huge, and continues to grow. But the problem of illegal downloading has cramped the progress of the industry. It doesn't make sense to allow people to use the music "however they want," but people have gotten used to it and are rejecting DRM.
The University of Southern California, previously subscribing to Napster in a highly unsuccessful campaign to stop downloaders, recently began providing the Ruckus service to its entire student body. Coinciding with 125, the subscription was touted as a leap into the digital future. Interesting, but I don't think it will work. People are so used to BitTorrent, DC++ for public schools and other services that they have absolutely no problem "stealing" media. And when they aren't able to find what they want, people automatically go to iTunes. The 99-cent song/$9.99 album model makes everything seem like a deal, and in theory, you will then own that song forever - at least for your own personal use. For the subscription model, as soon as you get rid of your monthly service, you no longer have access to the songs. And this, for many people, is a deal-killer.
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