In
the article it said that Ruckus was giving away the service to anyone with a
working “.edu” address. I registered as
an alum and gave my class year, as opposed to saying I was a current student (I
don’t know why I took them at face value).
I
clicked on the registration link sent to my school address and was shown two
really enormous and annoying ads. First there
was a “free ringtones” service sign up (cancel anytime etc) as the landing
page, on which I clicked “No thanks”- marveling at how much customer goodwill
they just wasted.
Then
they showed me an ITT tech ad! This seemed moronic-surely there is an
advertiser out there who would pay more that ITT to show ads to people who went
to actual 4-year universities. Besides,
I have this thing about ITT Tech that looking at their ads is inherently bad
luck (silly superstition that dates to when I was applying to college).
I
bet Ruckus could have made this service, with the no-downloading to iPod,
available to anyone with a college e-mail address (that would be a huge
potential audience right there- 80% of the 142 million US adults in the online
population have at least “some college” education). I bet that would have been an interesting play,
but that’s not what they did. I thought,
I’m not giving them my credit card info, I thought, but I still want to
explore.
So
after all this clicking…all they offered me was a free 3-day trial.
Another
thing I turned up last week was that technically, you can use rhapsody with an
iPod if you are willing to forego the fact that it’s an iPod and let Rhapsody
manage your collection of songs purchased from Rhapsody, as well as MP3 and aac files.
To
set up your iPod to work with compatible Rhapsody files:
-
Update Rhapsody
-
Install the iPod software and iTunes
-
Update iTunes
-
Activate your iPod
- Turn off automatic song updating and
podcast updating in iTunes
-
Enable disk use in iTunes
-
Attach the iPod and open Rhapsody
These steps are not supported, that this would be way way too complex for the average user, and as likely as not to stop working unexpectedly.