Serendipity35

It was only about a year ago that I wrote about the Ruckus music service that offered free and legal music downloads and was being widely promoted at colleges.
Ruckus allowed students to stream (not save, transfer or copy) an unlimited amount of music. It was touted as a legal alternative to music piracy.

Originally, Ruckus was a subscription service, then it became an ad-supported service in partnership with some big universities, and then eventually it was open to any students with a university email address. When I wrote about it last year, it had been acquired by Total Music (a joint venture between Sony and UMG) and was supposed to be as a way to launch a commercial service like iTunes or Amazon mp3 download services. Total Music was rumored to be working with Facebook to provide a music service, but that apparently did not happen. (Total Music more recently launched Tunepost which streams music through a widget.)

Perhaps, the end of Ruckus and other Web 2.0 services is just another indication of the state of our economy. Perhaps, it's the natural selection of technologies.

I view this along with the Record Industry Association of America (RIAA) decision to discontinue issuing lawsuits against college students for downloading music and focus on Internet Service Providers (ISPs) to reduce illegal music sharing. One reason for that shift is that large ISPs are also becoming content providers and as these converge, ISPs are more willing to protect the content.

According to the RIAA, their lawsuit program which received much publicity (much of it negative) has been successful in teaching awareness about the law, and promoting the idea that the owners of the music are entitled to compensation.

One new approach of the RIAA is a grade school propaganda/education (choose for yourself) campaign unveiled this month aimed at children as young as third graders. Called Music Rules!, the program offers free materials for educators on request or by download. Like many corporations, the guides for teachers and parents and curriculum "designed to reinforce skills across the curriculum in math, language arts, citizenship, and music" 

Are there still places to get free music legally? Yes, though don't expect to find every song you crave.  The RIAA itself offers a list of sources and a search will turn up plenty of bloggers offering links to services that offer free legal music to download. The RIAA list is probably frequently out-of-date (it offers sites like Sam Goody as sources, but it no longer exists), because this is an industry in flux.

I have also written about academic integrity issues here and I know that when you write about sites that offer research papers and essays for free or for sale in order to educate teachers and students, you are also offering information on how to plagiarize. For music, when the Center for Democracy and Technology offers a warning list of music download sites to avoid, it's also offering a tempting list of sources.