No More Pandora.com :(

[G3N3R4L]

"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."



Pandora Internet Radio - Find New Music, Listen to Free Web Radio


thats pretty sad... pandora was wicked.

[dabbler]

well they almost got shut down by huge fees

[.LxT]

Not the fees are what kills them but after about 60 years of what was an established fact that radio stations benefit artists and under pressure from the RIAA it has been decided that radio stations need to pay royalties on all music they play [what's even more interesting is that the RIAA will be collecting fees on artists they don't actually own, but that's different]

Pandora wasn't accessible for quite some time now, last I tried was 2 weeks ago I think. Maybe they phased it out slowly or something.

There's still Last.fm The Social Music Revolution [which I've been using for a couple of years now anyway] to satisfy your new music needs.

[miss.myra]

yeah i was pretty upset when this came around too, pandora was awesome

[dabbler]

they were asked to pay upwards of $500 for each CHANNEL they had (per user) and the total is somewhere in the billions apparently. almost a billion dollars in fees paid to the RIAA just for collecting the actual royalty payments

[miss.myra]

here's the letter from the founder that i recieved in my inbox about a month ago

Dear Pandora listener,

Today we have some extremely disappointing news to share with you. Due to international licensing constraints, we are deeply, deeply sorry to say that we must begin proactively preventing access to Pandora's streaming service from Canada. We began blocking access from almost all countries outside the U.S. last week and had originally hoped to maintain access to Canada. However, it has become clear in the last week that we just haven't been able to make enough progress to continue streaming.

It is difficult to convey just how disappointing this is for us. Our vision remains to eventually make Pandora a truly global service, but for the time being, we can no longer continue as we have been. As a small company, the best chance we have of realizing our dream of Pandora all around the world is to grow as the licensing landscape allows.

We show your IP address is 'x', which indicates you are listening from Canada. If you believe you are seeing this by mistake, we offer our sincere apologies and ask that you please reply to this email.

Delivery of Pandora is based on proper licensing from the people who created the music - we have always believed in honoring the guidelines as determined by legislators and regulators, artists and songwriters, and the labels and publishers they work with. In the U.S. there is a federal statute that provides this license for all the music streamed on Pandora. Unfortunately, there is no equivalent license outside the U.S. and there is no global licensing organization to enable any webcaster to legitimately offer its service around the world. The volume of listening on Pandora makes it a very expensive service to run. Streaming costs are very high, and since our inception, we have been making publishing and performance royalty payments for every song we play.

Until last week, we have not been able to tell where a listener is based, relying only on zip code information provided upon registration. We are now able to recognize a listener's country of origin based on the IP address from which they are accessing the service. Consequently, on May 16th, we will begin blocking access to Pandora to listeners from Canada. We are very sad to have to do this, but there is no other alternative.

We will be posting updates on our blog regarding our ongoing effort to launch in other countries, so please stay in touch. 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 deeply share your sense of disappointment and greatly appreciate your understanding.


-Tim Westergren
(Pandora founder)
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