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Pandora, the awesome online personal radio service, will block any IPs not coming from the US because of copyright related issues. It looks like the US are blessed to have something called Digital Millenium Copyright Act (DMCA) that allows Pandora to stream their music there. Outside the US nothing such as DMCA so no Pandora for us. Nice.

Yet another example of how the industry gets it all wrong.
In the best interest of their artists, shouldn’t copyright holders want as much exposure as possible via “controlled” platforms such as Pandora instead of letting the “free” pirate market set the pace? Call me naive but more exposure means more chances of selling a record to the online listener and more chances of filling a concert hall.

If any lesson is repeated over and over in the digital world is that you can’t put fences to information as they tend to wear out in no time. First it was Mp3 compression allowing for faster downloads of high quality audio, then per to peer networks allowing for decentralized file sharing and now, user generated content that competes with expensive productions of large media corporations.

Here’s the letter Pandora is sending to their users.

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 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.

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 us to legitimately offer Pandora around the world. Other than in the U.K., we have not yet been able to make significant progress in our efforts to obtain a sufficient number of international licenses at terms that would enable us to run a viable business. 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 now, 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 3rd, we will begin blocking access to Pandora to listeners from your country. 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.