Tom Conrad

We’re down to the wire and all the final pieces are falling into place. Tomorrow night about this time we’ll be taking the stage to start making our announcements. Some really fun stuff coming; a long time in the making. Can’t wait to get it out there and hear what you all think. Be sure to checkout Pandora tomorrow night around 10PM pacific…

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.

 I wrote this as a guest blog post for hubcanada.com last week, thought I’d share it here as well:

This past week, Pandora began blocking access to our radio streams for all listeners outside the US, Canada, and the UK. This is an incredibly disappointing outcome for us after more than a year of effort toward securing international licensing for Pandora.

Music licensing is a complicated topic, with at least three parties involved when each song is played. There’s the songwriter who composed the song, the label that owns the recording itself, and the performing artist.  Webcasters are legally obligated to make royalty payments that benefit all of these parties. In the United States, ASCAP, BMI, and SESAC collect royalties on behalf of the songwriters, and a clearing house called SoundExchange collects royalties for the labels and artists. With respect to the labels and artists, in the US a blanket license is provided to webcasters under the terms of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.

Unfortunately there is no similar blanket license for labels and performing artists in any country outside the US (most countries do however have some sort of centralized authority for songwriters — for example SOCAN in Canada). This means that making correct payments to the labels is dependent on striking a unique deal with each record label, in each country. Even where the “big four” labels are concerned you have to do a separate deal in each country — Warner “U.S.” is not the same as Warner “U.K.” Pandora plays music from thousands of labels, big and small, and thousands of artists who are not on any label. Even when you take into account the big four labels, and various indie aggregators, there are still thousands of separate deals to do in each and every country. Factor in a licensing environment that is — in general — less than friendly to digital music providers and the task becomes quite Herculean.  We have been told in no uncertain terms by the largest rights holders that we had to take this step.

Pandora is a company of musicians. It’s critically important to us that artists and composers are compensated for the music we play. That’s not the stance that all music services take, but it’s very much a part of our DNA. After well over a year of trying to strike deals that would ensure that payments were made to the right entities, it became clear that outside of Canada and the UK those deals were going to take a very, very long time. In light of that, we decided to move beyond zip-code verification and block based on IP address location. This was a very painful decision, but in the end we can’t ignore the existing legal reality.

We’ll continue working as hard as we can to obtain these licenses with the ultimate goal of delivering Pandora as a truly global service. Who knows, perhaps we’ll even see a day were the entire industry moves to a global copyright system. One can hope. In the meantime we’ll surely miss the many, many musical friends we’ve made from all over the world.

On the night of May 22nd, Pandora will be making a series of announcements that are kind of game changers for us. At the very least it signals a new chapter in our story.

Reflecting on this, and having spent the afternoon yesterday with Robert Scoble, it occurred to me that it’s really time to dust off the blog and share some of the Pandora product development stories from the last 18 months. There have certainly been a lot of lessons; some of them learned the hard way.

Stay tuned… some fun news coming on the 22nd and a bit of Pandora history after that.

I met up with Robert Scoble yesterday with the plan to talk a bit about Pandora and then head over to the KFOG kaboom concert. After checking out the latest at the Apple Store we walked out to the water only to find a line of people (literally) a mile long waiting to get in. And those were the people with tickets.

We gave up and decided to head back into the city for some sushi and then managed to snag a great spot in the bar on the top floor of the Marriott hotel. Perfect view for the fireworks. I had a great time — lots of great conversation, some of which turned into several blog posts up at scobleizer.com today.

After months over a year of neglect, I’m shutting down my blogger account and moving to WordPress. Glad you managed to find me here. I’ve imported everything from blogger-land… looking forward to starting over here.

Tonight Pandora is making a fundamental change to the way we generate playlists. Up to this point Pandora stations have been driven entirely by the musical characteristics uncovered by the Music Genome Project. While this has provided us with a powerful foundation, we’re the first to admit that sometimes we just got it terribly wrong.

Starting tonight we’re adding an entirely new dimension to playlist generation: community feedback. Now our listeners’ collective feedback has the power to correct for the cases where the “music alone” gets it wrong. When that happens our listeners vote with their thumbs and now - when the evidence is overwhelming that a song just simply doesn’t belong on a particular station - that feedback will correct the station, not just for one listener, but for all listeners. In essence all our listeners just became part of the Music Genome Project team. Have a listen and let us know what you think.

If you live in the bay area and are interested in learning more about Pandora’s approach to user experience and playlist creation stop by tonight’s 7:30PM BayCHI meeting:

http://www.baychi.org/program/

Several exciting developments in social search and personalization help users find information: recommendations based on personal tastes, social trends, tags, ratings, popularity, and friends tastes. These methods go beyond the classic search paradigm of relevance and flat lists of results, resulting in different user experience challenges. This panel brings together panelists from Netflix, Live365, Pandora, and digg to explore trends in social search.

Rashmi Sinha has put together a great lineup for the panel including Neil Hunt from Netflix, David Porter from Live365, Kevin Rose from Digg, and Joshua Schachter from del.icio.us. I’m really looking forward to meeting all of these people; I’m a big fan of their work. Hope to see you there.

We rolled out a whole bunch of changes at Pandora tonight. Many of them are aimed at making playlists better; I’m pretty excited about those as that’s what it’s really all about for us. Have a listen and let me know what you think.

We’ve also added a tiny little progress bar to let you know how much of song is left. I can pretty safely say it’s the smallest progress bar every released. It’s just tiny. So get your bifocals and head on over to Pandora for a look.