Tom Conrad

Now it’s the military here and overseas blocking Pandora — this time not for copyright issues but to save bandwidth. From the official US Air Force website:

Defense Department officials are blocking access to many popular Internet sites from department-owned computers due to bandwidth issue… The sites are: youtube.com, pandora.com, photobucket.com, myspace.com, live365.com, hi5.com, metacafe.com, mtv.com, ifilm.com, blackplanet.com, stupidvideos.com and filecabi.com. read more.

We get letters every day at Pandora from our service people overseas saying that Pandora is one way they can get a taste of home, it’s part of what keeps them going, etc. Damn.

More bad news on the international licensing front for Pandora.

Starting Weds May 16th, we have to block access to visitors from IP’s in Canada. We’ve been working hard with the rights-holders there to bring a legitimate Pandora service on-line for Canadians, but those conversations have come to an abrupt end. Just a week after we started blocking most of the rest of the world comes news that there simply aren’t licenses in the cards for us in Canada in the near future which leaves us with no choice but to shut down Canadian access.

This is incredibly painful. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: we never wanted it to go this way. We have lots of great listeners in Canada and I’m incredibly sorry to see them go. We’ll continue to fight for licenses… the state of music copyright really is at a crossroads. What a terrible day.