Pandora Is Closing the Box
May 4th, 2007 by Don Ray
I just tried to connect to Pandora and got this.
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.
It is a shame that even US born citizens living outside the US are being denied the privilege of Pandora. It is things like this that cause pirating sites to flourish!
Hi Don:
I don’t get it when they say “licensing constraints”. Can you explain? I always thought the Internet was a global network, so why would Pandora restrict its coverage? I just don’t get it.
Regards,
Omar.-
I don’t know what they have in their licenses, but a few weeks ago I got the same message from Slacker. I think they are tightening their security to be in compliance with what ever their agreements are. I guess the same things should apply to yahoo and other music providers.
Don Ray,
This is not unexpected. Clear Channel restricted content to outside of the US many months ago. One of radio stations in Colorado that I listen to has limited its Internet radio to the US only, even its own programs! They don’t even know what the licensing constraints are with their own on air talent. Fortunately, I generally use a corporate server in the US, which I use Citrix to log into. Since the server is in the US, I don’t have these restrictions. I can run Pandora on the Citrix Server in Colorado. Using Citrix server has the possible secondary benefit is that the IP address that is used does not identify where I am located geographically. You may want to try to use a public proxy server that is in the US.
The music industry (the corporations and license holders, not the musicians) seems to be its own worst enemy. And if the extremely high retroactive royalty fees for wireless & Internet radio don’t get rolled back by Congress, then Pandora will be out of business shortly.
I think in the long run this is going to hurt the music industry. I still think that more and more artists will eventually move away from the music companies and deliver their music directly to their fans via the Internet. Personally if the music companies keep this up I will not be sorry to see them all go broke.
I will look at some of the proxy servers, but I don’t trust a lot of these services. I think some are good sources of viruses.
Generally the license agreements for intellectual property content are country specific since the laws in countries are different. For example, we did some offshore software development and based upon that country’s laws, the offshore company had rights to the software that we developed & sent to them. So just the possession of our software that we developed gave them rights to it. There are worldwide intellectual property laws but are not supported by all countries.
Well they can tighten the intellectual rights so much on music that no one will be able to listen to anything unless they buy pirated music.
Have you tried visiting the Pandora website using a proxy server (Or an anonymizing plug in to your web browser?) That might solve the problem. I suspect that they blacklist (identify and reject IP’s that are not physically located within the USA) rather than whitelist (require evidence that the ip IS within the USA). If that is the case, if they can’t identify your IP (because its been anonymized) they will not block your access.
I have been able to get into several site sthat block access to non USA IP’s by using Megaproxy and while I haven’t tried, I suspect that it would work for Pandora as well.
PS: I just saw your comment about viruses. That should not be an issue if you are using a retail anonymizer plug in and I don’t think that Megaproxy is a virus distribution site.
Hi Susan. Thanks for taking the time to leave a comment. No I haven’t tried the proxy server yet. It is on my list of things to do. Right now I have switched to Slacker which I am enjoying as much as Pandora. When they go off the air, I will go the proxy server route.
Don Ray,
You may already be familiar with this site that I just discovered - it looks to be a similar service, called last.fm. Don’t know whether or not you will run in to the same issues with it. Based in London.
http://www.last.fm/
Thanks Gordo. I will give it a look see if Slacker goes off the air like Pandora. Right now I am happy with Slacker.