(week 7) and the award goes to...

Dear Pandora Visitor,
We are deeply, deeply sorry to say that due to licensing constraints, we can no longer allow access to Pandora for most 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.

Pandora used to be one of my favourite web 2.0 sites, and despite having been unable to use it for some time, I'm still certain that it's a worthy winner in the Web 2.0 awards.

Pandora works by allowing you to pick a favourite song/band/artist and then, drawing on the mind-boggling work of the Music Genome Project, presenting you with music that is similar in its "melody, harmony, instrumentation, rhythm, vocals and/or lyrics". It aims to introduce you to new music from both mainstream and independent artists. Ideally when you hear songs that you like, you purchase downloads/CDs of these people's music.

With a free (advertisement supported) subscription you can listen to songs in full but you can only skip a certain number of songs per hour. This restriction ensures that you explore the music properly (and hopefully, are tempted to buy it). Also to ensure that you give all songs a fair go, you are unable to rewind or repeat tracks on demand. When you do skip a track, or indicate that you like it, the interface feeds this in to its future selections for you and other users.

Unfortunately, due to recent copyright developments, Pandora is no longer accessible from Australia:

TIM WESTERGREN: It’s pretty simple. We pay a licensing fee for every song that we stream, which was determined by the Copyright Royalty Board. And the royalty board just voted to almost triple those fees within the next couple of years [retroactive back to January of 2006, with more money going to labels rather than the artists themselves]. So overnight, they’ve made webcast radio pretty much impossible. It’s impossible, at these new rates, to really operate a radio station online. (more here)

Big business wins again.