Could the last listener in Britain please turn out the lights?

Pandora.com will be turning off their service to folks in the UK today, although at the time of writing, the service is still up and running. I suspect when the clock chimes at midnight, the lights will go off...

I you really love Pandora and PandoraJam, and reside outside the USA (or happen to be on holiday or a lucky ex-pat posted in some exotic location), there are a few options to get you rocking again.

The first is to pony up for a VPN service, based in the USA, which will give you a USA based IP address. Google is your friend here, with some providers costing only a few bucks a month. Translation - for the cost of a few pints a month, you can enjoy Pandora and other US only sites, and a decent VPN service is useful in itself, especially if you're a laptop roadwarrior.

The second option is to hop on over to GlobalPandora - it only works in your browser, but it really works! A few folks contacted me to give me the heads up. I'll be taking a closer look at GlobalPandora to see if its something that can be mashed-up with PandoraJam. In the meantime, you should hop over to the site, and give it a spin. I'm not affiliated with the people responsible for GlobalPandora so you're flying solo - caveat emptor and all that.

As mentioned in my previous post, get in touch if you're in the UK and you purchased the software recently (from Dec 1st, 2007) and I can issue you a refund if you want. If you purchased before this time, get in touch and I'll sort out a discount coupon for some of my other software.

Finally, the third option is to listen to another audio service. What's hot and what's not? Let me know!

UPDATE: It's definitely over for the Brits. The official Pandora blog now mentions it too. If you visit the Pandora web-site from the UK you get this message:
"We are deeply, deeply sorry to say that due to licensing constraints, we can no longer allow access to Pandora for listeners located outside of the U.S. We will continue to work diligently to realize the vision of a truly global Pandora, but for the time being we are required to restrict its use. We are very sad to have to do this, but there is no other alternative."

Achtung! Unhappy New Year for UK Pandora Listeners

Pandora.com will cease to broadcast to UK listeners as of January 15th, 2008. The reason for this bad news? Royalty rates demanded by recording bodies would put Pandora.com, one of the most popular and innovative internet radio services, out of business.

Tim Westergren, founder of Pandora, sadly says in an e-mail to UK listeners:

"Both the PPL (which represents the record labels) and the MCPS/PRS Alliance (which represents music publishers) have demanded per track performance minima rates which are far too high to allow ad supported radio to operate and so, hugely disappointing and depressing to us as it is, we have to block the last territory outside of the US."

I'll write more on this later, but I want to address the impact on PandoraJam users first.

What effect will this have on PandoraJam USA users?

None. PandoraJam will continue to provide an enhanced experience for Pandora.com listeners based in the USA, and provide compatibility with the Pandora.com site for as long as possible.

What effect will this have on PandoraJam UK users?

• You have one more week of usage, so start listening, scrobbling, etc. Take no prisoners!
• If you have access to a USA based proxy, or are willing to use Tor, check out this blog post. That way, even after Pandora.com switches off the UK, you can keep listening.
  
• If you purchased PandoraJam from 1st December 2007, you can ask for a refund and get your $15 back. E-mail me at support@pandorajam.com. This is going to be a logistical nightmare to sort out... sigh... Of course you don't have to ask for a refund, if you feel you got your £7.50 worth of fun and want to support an indie developer with beer money :-)
• If you purchased PandoraJam before the 1st December 2007, e-mail me and I will issue you a discount coupon for some of our other software. There are plenty of other sites which you can listen to audio from, and record from, but of course, Pandora is one of the best. If you really need the few quid back, then get in touch.

Thanks for reading on what is a bad day for Internet radio.

Radiotastic update: 0.92

A new version of Radiotastic is now available for download, with initial support for Leopard! I say 'initial' as running multiple instances of the widget only works in Tiger and is not yet supported in Leopard, but everything else such as listening and recording should work fine.

Download link:
http://www.bitcartel.com/downloads/radiotastic.wdgt.zip

Summary of changes:

• Support for OS X 10.5 (Leopard)

p.s. Happy New Year!

UPDATE: Unfortunately it appears having other audio widgets playing audio in Dashboard will affect the operation of Radiotastic, so it's best to run it as your only audio widget. Of course, this is less than ideal. Sorry folks. I'll be working to fix this, no ETA, but thanks in advance for your patience.