A largely overlooked music streaming service available free to college students nationwide since January may rise to new prominence on the campus, as OIT officials consider signing an agreement with Ruckus Network, Inc.
Although any student with a .edu e-mail address can already access the service, Office of Information Technology Spokeswoman Phyllis Dickerson Johnson said she expected that the university would reach an official agreement this week, hoping it would increase student use after a previous contract with the subscription based music streaming network, CDigix, ended last week when the company folded.
Some universities who have entered similar agreements with Ruckus have paid extra to include bonuses such as the such as the ability to view television shows or movies, but Dickerson Johnson declined to comment on the specifics of the university’s agreement.
Ruckus offers 2.5 million songs free for students to stream, compared to the $2-a-month price tag CDigix charged for a field of 2 million songs.
However, Ruckus will still have to compete with a raft of free services used widely by students like BitTorrent and LimeWire.
Even Matt Van Sant, a junior information services major serving on an OIT committee to explore the program, said he hadn’t heard of it until the committee met for the first time last week.
“I’ve heard it’s comparable to CDigix,” he said, “but other than that I still haven’t really heard much about the program.”
Though CDigix has repeatedly declined to release statistics on the number of students who used the service, it received a lukewarm reception on the campus because students had to pay an extra fee to download songs and it wasn’t available on Apple computers.
And with many of these same pitfalls present in the Ruckus service, Rebecca Jeschke, media relations coordinator for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, an Internet activist organization, said she was hardly surprised more students weren’t using the software already.
“If you can’t transfer it to your iPod or listen to it in your car,” she said, “that’s not really the way that people in the digital age are used to controlling their entertainment.”
On a college campus, where Macs are particularly popular, Van Sant admitted that the compatibility issue would restrict Ruckus’ relevance.
Dickerson Johnson said OIT is also considering signing up with iTunes U, which is offered free to all universities that choose to enroll. However, according to its website, the software that would allow professors to podcast lectures is more like WebCT or Blackboard than CDigix.
OIT has no estimates of how many students now use Ruckus, but Dickerson Johnson said regardless of user rates, endorsing any legal downloading service would send an important message against piracy, even if it does nothing more than raise awareness about the program.
“Offering affordable, even free legal alternatives is one of the several approaches that serves to communicate a message that we expect our students, faculty and staff to comply with the law and university policy,” she said.
Contact reporter Ben Slivnick at slivnickdbk@gmail.com.
