[Non-US listeners] Back to Pandora!

Tuesday, January 15th, 2008

Don’t know if this will last for very long, but for now globalPandora allows listeners from all around the world to tune back into music-recommendation service Pandora again.  back in May 2007, Pandora was forced to shutdown its service for users outside the USA due to licensing-issues/-cost. tech-savvy users may have been able to bypass the IP-based restrictions using public proxies, but this approach was mostly unstable or insufficient regarding bandwidth. rock on! :)

(via TechCrunch)

Pandora: back in charts!

Thursday, May 24th, 2007

music recommendation has seemingly been dominated by Last.fm recently (new widgets, video-content, mashups), while competitor & innovator Pandora was less lucky being forced to shut down services outside the US. at yesterdays press-event at the Museum of Modern Art (SF), Pandora  reported back with an impressive array of announcements, including…

  •   …a much needed revamp of their website, aiming to bring Pandora’s social networking-features to the attention of 6.9mio registered users
  • …integration with  the Sonos Digital Music System, bringing personalized radio into every corner of your house (read my in-depth review of the Sonos at PLAY.FM)
  • …a mobile WiFi-player jointly developed with SanDisk & Zing
  • …and most groundbreaking - from my point of view - a deal bringing Pandora to Sprint-cellphones across the United States…music recommendation finally goes mobile!

related articles: Pandora, Last.fm

byebye Pandora :(

Thursday, May 3rd, 2007

according to TechCrunch, music-recommendation service Pandora is closing down their doors to non-US visitors (as identified by IP-filtering) on thursday evening. this was somewhat conceivable as Pandora has been operating under a DCMA-agreement valid for US-listeneres only since they started in 2005. until today, querying nationality/zip-code at sign-up was the only way Pandora enforced this restriction.

right now the Pandora-Last.fm mashed-up stream I’m listening to is still working (funny enough, as the screenshot of the takedown-notice at TechCrunch highlights an Austrian IP-address)…

update: as of today, Pandora is down in europe: :(

Dear Pandora Visitor,

We are deeply, deeply sorry to say that due to licensing constraints, we can no longer allow access to Pandora for most listeners located outside of the U.S. We will continue to work diligently to realize the vision of a truly global Pandora, but for the time being we are required to restrict its use. We are very sad to have to do this, but there is no other alternative.

We believe that you are in Austria (your IP address appears to be 86.59.38.46). If you believe we have made a mistake, we apologize and ask that you please contact us at pandora-support@pandora.com

If you are a paid subscriber, please contact us at pandora-support@pandora.com and we will issue a pro-rated refund to the credit card you used to sign up. If you have been using Pandora, we will keep a record of your existing stations and bookmarked artists and songs, so that when we are able to launch in your country, they will be waiting for you.

We will be notifying listeners as licensing agreements are established in individual countries. If you would like to be notified by email when Pandora is available in your country, please enter your email address below. The pace of global licensing is hard to predict, but we have the ultimate goal of being able to offer our service everywhere.

We share your disappointment and greatly appreciate your understanding.

Sincerely,

Tim Westergen

Tim Westergren
Founder