I just received an email containing some terrible news. Pandora, an internet radio station which delivers songs based on your taste, has been told to block of all access to Canada. I have used this service so much and I can only hope that they are allowed to reopen their doors. The email is below.

Dear Pandora listener,

Today we have some extremely disappointing news to share with you. Due to international licensing constraints, we are deeply, deeply sorry to say that we must begin proactively preventing access to Pandora’s streaming service from Canada. We began blocking access from almost all countries outside the U.S. last week and had originally hoped to maintain access to Canada. However, it has become clear in the last week that we just haven’t been able to make enough progress to continue streaming.

It is difficult to convey just how disappointing this is for us. Our vision remains to eventually make Pandora a truly global service, but for the time being, we can no longer continue as we have been. As a small company, the best chance we have of realizing our dream of Pandora all around the world is to grow as the licensing landscape allows.

We show your IP address is ‘24.xxx.xxx.xx’, which indicates you are listening from Canada. If you believe you are seeing this by mistake, we offer our sincere apologies and ask that you please reply to this email.

Delivery of Pandora is based on proper licensing from the people who created the music - we have always believed in honoring the guidelines as determined by legislators and regulators, artists and songwriters, and the labels and publishers they work with. In the U.S. there is a federal statute that provides this license for all the music streamed on Pandora. Unfortunately, there is no equivalent license outside the U.S. and there is no global licensing organization to enable any webcaster to legitimately offer its service around the world. The volume of listening on Pandora makes it a very expensive service to run. Streaming costs are very high, and since our inception, we have been making publishing and performance royalty payments for every song we play.

Until last week, we have not been able to tell where a listener is based, relying only on zip code information provided upon registration. We are now able to recognize a listener’s country of origin based on the IP address from which they are accessing the service. Consequently, on May 16th, we will begin blocking access to Pandora to listeners from Canada. We are very sad to have to do this, but there is no other alternative.

We will be posting updates on our blog regarding our ongoing effort to launch in other countries, so please stay in touch. We will keep a record of your existing stations and bookmarked artists and songs, so that when we are able to launch in your country, they will be waiting for you. We deeply share your sense of disappointment and greatly appreciate your understanding.
tim_signature.jpg
-Tim Westergren
(Pandora founder)

This is a one time account message

Good news for all those who use Google Analytics, a new BETA version of Analytics has just been rolled out and its better than ever. This comes at an excellent time as I was considering purchasing the online metrics software from www.getclicky.com which is shotty at best.

Whats new? Well Google now offers information on EVERYTHING about your site and arranges it into nice graphs and charts for you. A flash based mapping system allows users to narrow down to continents, countries, and cities giving detailed statistics along the way.

In addition to all of this, everything is organized into what we would call “widgets” which you can send to your dashboard for quick checking of stats.

For more information, take the Google Analytics Tour, its well worth checking out.

I have received a bunch of Joost invites. Anyone that would like one please leave your email below so that I can copy and paste it into the invite box. Please post your email, none of this Jake AT geeeee male dot com.

I’m really happy joost has decided to give out more invites, it shows that they are getting closer to the release date. While the programming is still a little weak, it is slowly getting better.