Friday, May 4, 2007

Pandora Blocked Outside of the USA

EDIT: Just after posting this, I read a comment from the founder of Pandora. He claims Pandora will still be available to Canadians, but all other countries will still be blocked. I'll post more as I hear more on this.

Apparently the RIAA likes to trample all over their own business, while blaming it on piracy.

Pandora, a popular music-recommendation service, is now being blocked outside of the United States. The reason: the RIAA wants Pandora to sign separate licensing deals in every single country it wishes to service.

Pandora has long been US only "officially", but it was never enforced. Canadians, for instance, could just enter in a fake zip-code (such as "90210") and the service would work normally. This is no longer the case, as technological measures are now being used to prevent this, something Pandora no-doubt didn't want to do but was instead forced to.

Now, a service that didn't compete with music sales (Pandora generates a play-list, but doesn't let you download music files, fast-forward or rewind, or select an individual song to listen to), but in-fact acts to increase music sales by utilizing technology to auto-match people with new music they may like (and later buy), has been castrated by the RIAA who likes to shoot from the hip without thinking things through first.

I personally used Pandora regularily, and also regularily purchased new music I had never even heard of before that I discovered through Pandora. That's no longer the case. Good job, RIAA!

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

I'm in the UK and I can still access Pandora - anyone know what this story is about?

watching_eyes said...

Hey Jack.

Thanks for posting to my Blog.

Perhaps Pandora has reached a licensing agreement with whatever organization handles that kind of stuff in the UK? It is definitely still blocked in Canada.

You can take a look at what I'm seeing when I try to visit Pandora from Canada here:

http://img256.imageshack.us/my.php?image=picture1iu1.jpg

Have a good one!

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