Ruckus music subscription program fails to cause excitement at American University

A number of colleges and universities have been flirting with the idea of providing music subscription services to students as part of their cost of study, and almost none of them have garnered much enthusiasm. In the latest trial, American University students were given a free trial of Ruckus, a movie and music downloading program. A full half of them didn't even bother to try it, and a third of those surveyed said it should definitely not be offered in the coming academic year. Many complained about the lack of Mac support, and were concerned about instituting a mandatory music subscription fee as part of their tuition when clearly not everyone would be interested or able to use the service. Not sure if this quite sank in to the administration at AU, whose response to the survey results has been to look into the possibility of switching to Napster as an alternative to Ruckus.

[Via Techdirt]

[Mike @ Dec 19th 2005 1:24AM]

I'm a student at American University and tried Ruckus, and the problems with service were numerous. The software itself was clumsy and barely usable. It was hard to even get access to what Ruckus had, and the selection that Ruckus did have wasn't very good. It was a pain to even access to stuff once you had selected it and wanted to run it. I liked that it had movies, but the fact was that most of the movies they did have were about 10 years old.

[Scott @ Dec 19th 2005 1:24AM]

I am also an American University Student. Besides the access problems and lack of mac support for us mac lovers, only students living on campus were allowed access to even try the program. As someone who lives off campus, I still had the fee built into my tuition and could not even have any type of acess to it. The administration has no idea what their students want. Remember, President Ladner is being investigated for misuse of funds.

[greenline @ Dec 19th 2005 1:24AM]

So the theory is to keep people from using University bandwidth to illegally download media right? Cause there is no real academic benefit from this, other than the "cool" factor and that apparently is lost. I am curious as to why Universities think this will work.

[Nick @ Dec 19th 2005 1:24AM]

My school (Boston University) has also been looking into this one. I wish people would stop living in denial -- regardless of the legal alternatives available, the selection will always be better and cheaper through free p2p methods. People will not stop sharing music, nor should they.

[Mad Anthony @ Dec 19th 2005 1:24AM]

The college I work for has implemented cDigix, a similar service. We've gotten pretty good reactions from students. It does work from off-campus, but it does not work on macs, and it's DRM does not work on iPods, which are what most students have. It DOES let you download music on up to 3 PC's, but you can't burn CD's.

Still, P2P isn't coming back - we've had it blocked for at least the last 3 years - so if students want to download music, it's either cdigix or one of the pay services.

[Finished.Law.School @ Dec 19th 2005 1:24AM]

Requiring all students to pay for bullshit like this is stupid. Tuition should cover the classes and related things, not shit like this. They might as well add in fees for alcohol if they are going to charge for downloading music and media. Fucking administrations of these schools sound dumb as hell.
I feel very strongly about schools charging students up the ass for useless shit.

[hafa @ Dec 19th 2005 1:24AM]

#7

second me that!