nonsmokingarea.com

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)

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

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 Westergren
Founder

leading music-recommendation service Pandora introduced some community-related features earlier this week (check their official blog for the full scope). however, listener-profiles (including listings of tracks which received most thumbs-ups & -downs) and a very basic search for listeners, artists & stations can’t really keep up with advanced community-features offered by last.fm. f.e., Pandora lacks last.fm’s ‘Musical Neighbours’, a feature that connects listeners by their shared tastes. on the upside, the new user-profiles allow to instantly playback bookmarked tracks on-demand. for now, I suggest to use PandoraFM, a mashup combining the best of both of products by submitting Pandora-playlists into Last.fm’s listener-history.

ps: if you’re interested in music-theory and the categorization Pandora is based on, you might want to check out the Pandora Podcast, featuring Kevin Seal, who works as a musical analyst at Pandora.

if you’re into music-recommendation & -exploration services, you might wanna check out Musicovery. set your preferred mood (energetic, dark, positive, calm), period (80ies, 90ies etc.) and musical genres, and Musicovery will generate a matching - though static - playlist. while this is definitely inferior to Pandora’s dynamically adjusting streams, Musicovery offers a beautiful flash-based visual chart to freely navigate the tracklist (something Pandora’s free-service offers only under restrictions due to licensing). imagine a similar interface to Pandora’s musical genome database, visualizing all sorts of musical connections & dependencies…I’ld gladly pay a monthly fee for that! (btw, Musicovery charges EUR 2,-/month for its high-bitrate streams, LoFi is free)

O’Reilly Digital Media published an elaborate feature on music recommendation service Pandora, including an interview with chief technical officer Tom Conrad. the article explains how the Music Genome Project - Pandora’s underlying recommendation engine - works and how new incoming music is analysed and categorized by 40 professional musicians. on the technical side, Conrad gives insight on Pandora’s software-architecture (J2EE, OpenLaszlo, PostgreSQL) and how it scales up to 2.5mio registered listeners.

mike arrington reports:

Music discovery site Pandora will be announcing that it has 1.8 million users sometime tonight or tomorrow. These customers have given Pandora a whopping 70 million pieces of song feedback over the last few months. Pandora will also be announcing that they will start to use this community feedback in evolving users’ playlists and delivering more relevant music.

http://www.techcrunch.com/…

personally: the more I’m using pandora the more I start to like it… it’s fun to create new “stations” based on musical-style, and the recommendation-system seems to work quite good. pandora really gets groovy when streamed to an external device like the sqzeezebox from slimdevice’ (read my review)…