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Ohio University's main provider of free, legal music cut service for good last week. Ruckus, the Virginia-based service that offered restricted songs for Windows users with a university e-mail address, shut down at 5:30 p.m. Friday with a brief message on their Web site. Unfortunately the Ruckus service will no longer be provided. Thanks it read. Several calls and e-mails to Ruckus for comment were not returned. Jason Herskowitz, vice president of product management for Ruckus' owner TotalMusic, cited expenses as a cause for its demise in a post on his blog Saturday. I regret that we didn't get to show you guys more about what we built - but in these extremely hard economic times (particularly for those in the music industry) it's hard to blame them from (sic) pulling the plug on a still-highly-speculative offering he said. TotalMusic bought Ruckus in May and has faced several problems since. Two original Ruckus executives quit, senior employees were laid off and the United States Department of Justice investigated the company for antitrust violations, according to TechCrunch, a blog that covers new Internet services and organizations. The investigation probed into whether TotalMusic - which is owned by Sony and Universal Music Group - could use its leverage with licensed songs to drive traffic toward its service. Songs previously downloaded will still work for up to 30 days, depending on when the license was last updated, said Sean O'Malley, Information Technology communications manager. As of last spring, 40 percent of OU students were registered with the service. Ruckus had a free contract with OU, resulting in faster downloading speeds for its more than three million songs. The agreement guaranteed it would be the exclusive free music provider for Windows users. Despite this, O'Malley said the school found out like everyone else. It would have been nice to hear it from them but sometimes companies try to save it right to the last minute O'Malley said. OU has not yet decided which direction to go in yet, but said it is possible the next music provider would be accessible to Macintosh users. We're definitely going to look at all options. Mac-compatible is on the table he said. - Dave Hendricks contributed to this report. |
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