The music industry, struggling to find workable business models for the digital age, apparently can't even give its product away. Ad-supported services like SpiralFrog have generated what can only be charitably called a "lack of enthusiasm," while another ad-supported service called Ruckus just shut its virtual doors this weekend. Such services were once held up as the answer to (first) collegiate music piracy and (eventually) to music piracy in general, but the ridiculous encumbrances offered by DRM helped ensure that neither solution proved compelling.

Raising a Ruckus

Legal music subscription services once looked like a possible way of dealing with campus copyright infringement; if students were simply given the music, why would they continue torrenting? But initial experiments with paid sites like the revamped Napster generated an outcry as students objected to having their school fees used to pay for services that many did not want or could not use.

Ruckus looked like an incredible solution. Back in 2006, it dropped its own subscription model, went ad-supported, and focused exclusively on the collegiate market. Schools had to sign deals with Ruckus, but the service was offered to students free of charge, which eliminated one big objection. Schools could show the music industry, which had been pursuing them through legislation at the state and federal level, that they were making a good faith effort to address the infringement problem (the services were so popular with administrators, at least, that 39 percent of schools in the US were offering one last year). Schools kept themselves out of trouble, the music industry earned revenue and addressed infringement, Ruckus rolled around in ad revenue, and students got free music.

That was the plan, anyway. Those who knew something about technology might have looked at the idea and concluded that it was unlikely to be compelling, but it convinced plenty of other people. For instance, when the Ruckus service came to Princeton, the student newspaper reported this telling comment from student body president-elect Rob Biederman: the Ruckus deal would "completely alleviate" the copyright infringement issues on campus.

Data source: EDUCAUSE

But it didn't, and the reasons weren't hard to find. One thing that plagued Ruckus and most similar services has been DRM—and because Apple's Fairplay has not been licensed, that has generally meant some flavor of Microsoft DRM.

This had several obvious consequences. First, it meant that students had to access the music through a Windows PC. Not a big deal, right? But it was a big deal, because Apple has made tremendous inroads in the college market. For instance, at Princeton, Macs accounted for an astonishing 40 percent of all student computers in 2008.

Second, the DRM was used to keep the songs from being burned to CD or even transferred to digital music players (not that this last restriction mattered all that much, since the DRMed tracks wouldn't have played on iPods, anyway, and would have been of little value to most students).

It also wasn't long before this "innovative" idea wasn't quite so innovative. Services like Last.fm opened up their own ad-supported streaming content to anyone, and Ruckus eventually had to open its offering to any student with an .edu e-mail address in an attempt to attract more users.

That apparently didn't happen, and it didn't help that the advertising market has been collapsing. So Ruckus pulled the plug on Friday, replacing its Web site with a graphic that said only, "Unfortunately the Ruckus service will no longer be provided. Thanks."

School-sponsored music is dead?

The demise of Ruckus will probably put an end to schools' experimentation with offering legal music services to their students, at least in the short term. On the one hand, remaining subscription services still require fees and come with too many restrictions to be compelling. On the other hand, there's no real reason to "offer" a free, ad-supported service; students can simply access several of these through the Web.

Schools may be tempted to make one more attempt, but using a different model. Ad-supported services might be good for browsing or sampling, but network connectivity isn't yet quite good enough to make students give up their iPods and rely on music stored in the cloud. So long as this situation persists, students will demand full control of their music, and music companies are looking for ways to give that to them.

Warner, in particular, is working on an initiative allowing unlimited downloading of music in any format, from any source, for a flat fee paid to the ISP. For colleges, this means a fee paid to the school by every student, but such a move would likely provoke less controversy because all students could actually make use of the music.