As of the 15th of January 2008, personalised music service
Pandora will block access to listeners from the UK.
In an email received today, Pandora Founder Tim Westergren expresses his sadness in not having been able to negotiate an 'economically workable licence fee.' Westergren states that both the PPL (on behalf of record labels) and MCPS/PRS Alliance (on behalf of music publishers) demanded a per-track fee which were too high to finance through an ad supported radio model.
In
July 2007 all countries outside of the US were blocked, with the exception of the UK, as the Pandora team were optimistic about finding a workable solution that allowed them to continue servicing one of their biggest markets.
In his email, Westergreen takes a shot at the 'powers that be' in the industry, "It continues to astound me and the rest of the team here that the industry is not working more constructively to support the growth of services that introduce listeners to new music and that are totally supportive of paying fair royalties to the creators of music. I don't often say such things, but the course being charted by the labels and publishers and their representative organizations is nothing short of disastrous for artists whom they purport to represent."
He goes further, "The only consequence of failing to support companies like Pandora that are attempting to build a sustainable radio business for the future will be the continued explosion of piracy, the continued constriction of opportunities for working musicians, and a worsening drought of new music for fans. As a former working musician myself, I find it very troubling."
Some of the world's biggest record labels have been seen to be embracing technology and digital music as they continue to struggle to monetize digital music amid rapidly falling CD sales. Social networking site
imeem has recently become the only site to establish a partnership with the worlds
four largest labels, where it streams the label's artists to its members at no cost. RCA have partnered with technology company PassAlong Networks to
create widgets that allows users to create playlists on their social networks and share them with friends.
On 05 January, Profit42
announced a way for users outside of the US create a Virtual Private Network (VPN) through a product called Hotspot Shield, which prevents sites such as Pandora and
Hulu seeing that a user is outside of the US.
Pandora also announced
a partnership with UK company Reciva today, that makes Pandora available for listeners in the US without the need for a PC or laptop. The Reciva platform will also allow users to continue giving songs the Pandora "thumbs up" or "thumbs down" to further fine-tune their Pandora station.