ilovecode

I’ve been a member of the great Pandora.com for quite a while now; It’s one of the best online radio stations out there. I received an email this week that explained due to licensing restrictions, I could no longer listen to Pandora because I am outside of the US:

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 for most countries outside of the U.S.

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.

My first reaction was “NOOOOOOOOOO!” Now that I’m in belgium, I really rely on Internet radio so I am able to listen to the music I like. I’ve only found one terrestrial radio station that I like here. So, I replied to the email and explained that I am a US citizen and am living here because my husband is in the Army. I pretty much begged and I didn’t expect to receive a response back. But, I did. They wrote a very detailed response explaining that on a US military base, we would have access because US Military bases are on “domestic US” internet addresses. Unfortunately, I am in a unique situation and we are stationed at a NATO base, so we won’t have the domestic IP address.

Unfortunately I won’t have access to Pandora anymore while I’m over in Belgium, but I was really impressed with how they were willing to help me get connected if they could. I’m a contributing member, but I think I paid $36/year or something. That’s not a huge sum so I thought it was nice that they took the time to address my individual situation. Pandora will continue to get my support and hopefully over time the licensing restrictions will be lifted and I will be able to listen while I am still over here in Europe.

If you live in the US and haven’t tried Pandora.com, you definitely should. They provide an outstanding service.

This entry was posted on Saturday, May 5th, 2007 at 11:33 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.