Culture

Pandora Shuts Down Service to Canada

by kate | May 14, 2007 at 04:07 pm

1825 views | 10 Recommendations | 3 comments

The founder of Pandora. Tim Westergren, has just emailed out an apology to Pandora listeners in Canada in which he explains that he is unhappy about having to stop streaming Pandora to Canada, but has been given no choice. Pandora is an online music service that delivers music to listeners based on the presence of "music genomes" that detemine likeness between different musicians and bands. There is apparently no licensing structure that allows US broadcasters to legally stream outside of the US. THis is weird, and terrible!

<a href="http://blog.pandora.com/pandora/">pandora blog</a>

Canada

Much
to our chagrin, on the heels of our being forced to block virtually our
entire international listening audience, we now have to add Canada to
the list (beginning May 16th). We had been hopeful that the licensing
situation with our Northern friends might have some hope of imminent
resolution. However, after a tough week, and in the wake of the
substantial attention the blocking has clearly brought to this issue,
it's been made clear to us that we cannot continue streaming into
Canada.

No need to reiterate just how difficult this is. It's just a
terrible thing for music that there's not even a licensing structure
available that would allow a webcaster to stream legally outside the
U.S.

I'll reiterate our commitment to fighting as hard as we can to fix
this absurd problem - we only hope that reform will come soon so that
we can get back to the business of listening and discovery.

My sincerest apologies.

Tim (Founder)