Monday, May 14, 2007

Pandora restricted

A sad day indeed when a site has become restricted for us, not because of the Great Firewall of China but because of new licensing laws implemented in the US. Pandora is down for all of us outside the States, as I found today when trying to access the site:

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.


(Thanks to Piskokid whose site I just came across and found the above information)

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

Licensing restrictions like this are so out-of-touch with the reality of the world today. Pandora users can probably get around this using a US-based VPN, for example, AnchorFree.com's free Hotspot Shield.

Sr Cuervo said...

I agree a sad day indeed and it only proves as in many other cases that most people in the US only focus their market to the US without realizing the globalizing power of the internet. It happens to me a lot when I go into US websites for shopping or the like. The best replacement I could find for pandora has been random internet radio stations or last fm but none of them are the same so I just end up actually listening to the 80GB of mp3s I have.

Anonymous said...

ok fck pandora. there is this, i used it prior to pandora. www.live365.com ENJOY!

Unknown said...

Kevin, indeed it is a feeble attempt and it seems that we are all simply chasing each other's tail's, trying to find the next workaround.

Curvo, I'm enjoying last.fm these days. I also have a lot of music I haven't listened to for a long time. It's always nice to make new discoveries though.

Assia, I try and keep this as a family friendly blog, but I thank you for the link, too. Looks good.

J