Reading a post Death By Lawyer: 10 Cool Sites We Miss and was interested to find Pandora listed there.
Had been using Pandora for a while. Nice project that creates virtual radio stations based on your tastes in music. But it seems that has all gone done the tube for non-USA Internet citizens.
Previously Pandora only asked users to enter a US ZIP code to verify that they were US citizens. (I wonder how many users had a Wikipedia ZIP code?) As of a few days ago Pandora has been forced to filter by IP address. So now when you try to use the service you get a Pandora restricted page.
I am sorry to see this service go, and the Pandora people are sorry as well.
- Pandora: Breaking Pandora’s Heart… (3 May 2007)
- Pandora: Canada (14 May 2007)
Another thing to note is that the various Pandora clients, like PandoraMan, have also stopped working for international users. They are after all just little web browsers, and suffer from the same IP restrictions.
LinuxWorld put up a story about this yesterday:
Box closed for now on Pandora’s Australian radio service