Vassar Technology Today | Legally free: Downloads make turning point with ads

Matthew Leung Managing Editor

Since the iTunes Store opened its doors for $0.99 music downloads in 2003, it has become the world’s largest music download store, cashing in two billion song purchases over the past four years. It seems that competing music download services must directly confront Apple’s near-monopoly in order to get noticed.

On Monday, Jan. 22, Ruckus (www.ruckus.com) started doing just that by offering a free ad-supported music download service to students who own an educational e-mail address. Ruckus also offers an $8.99 monthly subscription for alumnaie/i or staff. It boasts more than 300,000 registered users so far. Under this new offer, ads are displayed to users as they browse and download music. Ruckus signed contracts with four major record labels (Universal Music Group, Sony BMG Music Entertainment, Warner Music Group, and EMI Music) to offer 2.1 million songs (the iTunes Store carries 3.5 million). As of now, Ruckus is the only company that provides legal music downloads of a large scale for free.

The sole downside: It only works on the PC. With the popularity of Apple and the iPod, especially on campuses like Vassar, this limitation is an obvious roadblock to the popularization of Ruckus. But this apparently discriminatory decision to cut off Apple users also seems to hint at the hidden agenda of deterring computer users from choosing Apple products. Considering Apple’s empire in the digital multimedia market, the real strategy behind Ruckus’ decision to support only the PC seems more like an enterprise attempt for Microsoft to win back its popularity in the market.

Anyone who owns a .edu address can claim to be a college student and start downloading music from the site. Ads are displayed throughout the site, but the downloaded music does not contain any ads, and is the same quality as paid songs from services such as iTunes. The catch is that the free songs are protected with Microsoft’s proprietary Digital Rights Management (DRM) technology, meaning that they are encrypted and can only be played on the computer from which the songs were downloaded. This adoption of Microsoft’s DRM technology is Ruckus’ decision to cut off Apple: The technology is developed exclusively for the Windows Media Player and no Apple product can support it, not even the Windows Media Player that Microsoft created to run on the Mac platform. The only way to download and play the songs on a Mac is to run Boot Camp, a program bundled with Mac OS X to facilitate Intel-based Macs to run Windows XP. But a license for Windows XP is required, which costs over $200.

Both the client application and Windows Media Player can play the downloaded music. Users can also transfer the downloaded songs to MP3 players that support Microsoft’s DRM by paying $4.99 per month. Brands such as Creative and SanDisk support this technology. Coincidentally, iPods cannot support Micro-soft’s DRM technology. Users who want to download free music would have to stay away from the iPod and buy MP3 players that support Microsoft’s platform.

Ruckus also offers free movie downloads as well as Facebook-like features for sharing playlists and meeting other members, but only to colleges that enter into an agreement. Vassar does not have a contract, nor does it have enough Windows machines and non-iPod MP3 players to justify one.

According to Microsoft’s implied logic, if users have to choose between giving up the iPod (and the Mac) and obtaining free music downloads, the lure of free music will win out. It seems like Microsoft has worked out a deal to take back the digital multimedia market.

However, Ruckus is only a startup company with an uncertain future and loose ends to tie up. There is no way for Ruckus to tell whether the educational e-mail account owner is really a college student. Its user agreement simply asks the user to be honest when claiming to be either a student, alumnus or staff.

It is also doubtful that the ads will profitably sustain the free downloading of millions of songs. I tested the site using Symantec’s ad-blocking software, which successfully blocked most of the ads without interfering with the music search and download processes.

As for the songs, their DRM protection may deter novice users, but is only nominal for more savvy ones. As with any copyright protection on music circulating online today, it is not possible to prevent a song from being re-encoded into an unprotected MP3 format, which could then be played on the iPod and traded illegally through peer-to-peer services popular on college campuses.

The beginning phase of Ruckus has its share of holes and agendas, but it nonetheless marks a turning point in the digital media market. The new strategy: If you can’t change comsumers’ desire for free music, find a way to give them what they want and still make a profit.