Runaway Future

Way back in January of 2006, I wrote about Pandora. Pandora is an internet radio that tailors the music towards your preferences, so you type in a song or an artist and it plays songs/artists of similar attributes.

Ever since then, I’ve been using Pandora almost religiously, with four finely tuned “stations” set up to listen to different types of music.

Today, I went to load it up as normal and got this page instead.

Doing a little digging, I came across this blog posting from the Pandora blog:

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)

LINK

Ridiculous.

Here’s some further explanation. Again, ridiculous.

The future of online music, film, etc. is becoming increasingly bleak. I fear what will be in a few years time.