...with strings attached, of course. You didn't really think the industry that has been jumping up and down about piracy is suddenly going to do an about-face and go to the other extreme, did you? There'd be a greater chance of pigs flying if you ask me.
I've been checking out a service called Ruckus. Like its competitor, Spiralfrog, it is an advertising-based model, but Ruckus is aimed at college students only, providing access to millions of songs, including the major labels too. Quite a few colleges in the US have picked it up, with some colleges even providing an on-campus Ruckus server to ensure fast download speeds.
As with most of these services, it is US and Canada-centric right now, accepting only email addresses ending with .edu. Most Australian (and other countries') universities have email addresses ending with .edu.au only, so that rules most Australian students out. Some universities however, offer both, redirecting .edu emails to .edu.au. Monash is one so I took advantage of that - unfortunately neither RMIT or University of Melbourne seem to (http://www.monash.edu/ works, but http://www.unimelb.edu/ or http://www.rmit.edu/ doesn't). Not quite sure about other universities - just try your uni's website address without the .au and see what happens. If it works, then you're in luck.
The whole thing works on a subscription-style system, except the subscription is free in its case. Each song is licensed for a month at a time, which is automatically renewed when it expires. For most Australians, this concept is fairly foreign, as there is no such service available here, even if you pay. Basically what happens is you pay a flat fee (free in the case of Ruckus, but generally about the cost of a CD a month for others), which gives you access to an enormous library of songs. Each song you download is licenced to you for a particular period, after which it will refuse to play until you renew the licence over the net (which it does automatically as long as you paid your subscription fee). Hence you have to keep paying the monthly fee, otherwise the music you downloaded will time out.
I quite like the concept, as for a flat fee, you get access to a massive library of music that is being constantly updated with new tracks, a library that no one will be able to access legally otherwise. The issues here have to do with the implementation - each track can only be re-licensed from a certain provider, so you're locked in to that provider unless you're willing to redownload your local library. Also, the songs are generally limited to a certain amount of computers, so you can't share a subscription with a 100 computers, whether they're yours or not. And finally, the subscription technology varies between platforms and devices, so a subscription technology that works on your PC, may not work on your Mac, hence you may have to have multiple subscriptions to different providers for everything to work.
You've probably guessed by now that it utilises the popular Microsoft WMDRM system, hence it is limited to Windows users only (unless you virtualise). And this is one of the service's downfalls - with more and more students preferring Macs nowadays rather than PCs, the impact this will have on reducing piracy may be limited.
Anyway, enough analysis. To try it out, make sure you have a working .edu email address. Navigate to http://www.ruckus.com/, click on the sign up link, and fill it out. Make sure you turn your volume down, because the ruckus homepage has a video that plays on load (luckily the other advertising isn't as annoying). Because Australian universities won't be in their system, after you click submit, it will tell you it doesn't have your university in the system. Just select the new Ruckus Direct feature that has appeared, click submit again and it'll work.
Next you have to download the Ruckus Player, and install it. Once that's all done, launch Ruckus, go through the wizard and sign in. You'll then end up with something like this.
For some silly reason, you have to use your web browser to actually browse the library and download music, so either click the 'Get Music' link in the top right corner, or fire up your web browser and navigate to http://www.ruckus.com/ and sign in. Now do a search or click on the featured artists/albums, find your album, select the tracks you want and click download. Ruckus Player will fire up again and start downloading.
Once you've downloaded some tracks, your library will start filling up. It is a fairly basic iTunes lookalike media player, with support for playlists, and also transfer to PlaysForSure devices (i.e. devices that support WMDRM, which is basically most, the most notable exception being the iPod). You can't burn any songs to CD (who does that now anyway), and only Ruckus-downloaded tracks will show inside the Ruckus Player.
The ads you can see in the above screenshot is it - so they're not too intrusive. They're just standard graphic ads, no sound or video. If you minimise Ruckus, it turns into its mini-player form (see below). You cannot minimise Ruckus so that it has no visible window, but you can place other windows on top of the Ruckus window, to hide the ads.
Or alternatively, close Ruckus, fire up Windows Media Player and open up the downloaded tracks (all properly named by Ruckus) in that instead - voila, no ads! Not quite sure how effective their ad platform is anymore, although I think they get money from US colleges to provide an on-campus service, so there's another revenue stream. Maybe they're planning to sell the collected data later on...
At the end of the day, the biggest problem with Ruckus is its implementation. Not supporting the iPod and Macs cuts out a lot of the college student market. And while some social features exist, they're not implemented well at all - there's no integration with Ruckus Player, and they're not doing anything with the data collected apart from showing it in your profile. And having to browse the library outside of the player? WTF. When you're competing against the existing model of piracy, simply being legal and fast is not enough (even with the RIAA threats). The service has to be extremely slick and polished, work with what they have (iPods, sansas, Macs, mobiles), give them some value they don't have now (especially with regards to social features), and 'just work' all the time.
I don't think the subscription or advertising model itself is the issue - it's the fact that the service is an inferior in terms of usability to piracy, even though piracy isn't very slick at all. Yes pirating means you can do anything you want with the song, but if the subscription model meant that a typical user could do anything they might want to do with that song anyway, in an easier, slicker manner, then being legal may actually mean something.
Unfortunately, that will take a monumental effort, getting the music/movie distribution industry to work with the software industry to get a suitable subscription system working, who then need to work with consumer electronics industry to get that system into their devices. And by the time it gets that far, they may have to start convincing artists and directors that they're still relevant. And of course, when people are forced to get together to work things out, politics flare up even more, and inevitably buggers everything up.
So until something big actually happens, until some of these parties with vested interests encounter divine intervention or realise how well and truly screwed they are, we won't be seeing any real alternative to piracy, which is a shame, because there are some cool solutions out there that just need some love and co-operation. Ah well, it's nice to see these Ruckus guys trying, and their solution gives a nice insight into how it could work.