I was pretty bummed out when Pandora was forced to officially lock out listeners outside of the USA in May of 2007. It was a big blow but I comforted myself by thinking that it was only a matter on time before they settled their legal dispute and allowed international listeners back online. After almost 2 years of waiting I decided that it was time to take action… and success! This might not be the perfect solution but I have Pandora back and that’s all that matters to me.
What is Pandora?
Pandora is an online music service that gives the listener complete control over their online radio experience. Pandora is based on the Music Genome Project and allows you to explore music and expand your world by finding new music similar to your particular music tastes. For example you can enter a song name or artist and Pandora will build a radio station around your selection in order to bring you the best possible listening experience. You can broaden the style of the radio station by entering multiple artists or song names, create up to 100 personal stations, and share your stations with others or search for stations created by others. You can also interact with your radio station as it plays by giving a song a thumbs up or a thumbs down or skipping a song all together. You are allowed to skip up to 6 songs per hour. This interactivity helps ensure you are getting the music you want and nothing else.
- For a more detailed overview of Pandora check out How Pandora Radio Works by HowStuffWorks.com.
Many people often wonder if Pandora is a legitimate operation. Well it is… inside the United States. And here is where the problems start to materialize. Pandora operates under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, which gives them a way to pay royalties for songs in the US. Since there is no international equivalent of the DMCA, Pandora must sign deals directly with rights holders (music labels and artists of each song) in order to operate legally in other countries. Unfortunately separate deals for each song is an almost impossible task.
Pandora always made it clear that it was available for U.S. listeners only and requires a U.S. zip code for registration. But that didn’t stop many international users from registering using zip codes like the infamous “90210″. Now that Pandora is forced to block international users with IP-based filtering, it is a bit more difficult to listen to this popular music site… but not impossible.
How can you get Pandora?
If you go to the Pandora home page right now you will probably see an apologetic message from Pandora explaining that they are no longer allowed to stream music outside of the US. So I decided to find out how to fool the IP filtering tool used by Pandora so that I could reclaim my favourite music site. It turns out that it is very easy to accomplish this.
The solution is to set up a simple web proxy so your IP address and location remain anonymous. This is an easy and reliable way to listen to Pandora. And to be honest, Pandora sort of gives this solution away in their FAQ’s where one of the questions is, “How can I get around this? Perhaps a proxy server?”.
How do you set up a web proxy?
You can download proxy software to make the job really easy. The program I chose was UltraSurf which is really fast and easy to set up. Download UltraSurf as either a zip or exe file and run the executable to start the proxy connection. UltraSurf is a Windows only program but there are a lot of alternatives such as Hotspot Shield which is a virtual private network that works on Windows and Mac. The only downside to Ultrasurf is that it doesn’t work with all browsers so start off by opening Internet Explorer as that is the browser it was originally created for. I can’t guarantee that UltraSurf will work for every internet connection but it has worked on all of the computers I have tried so far. If you find that it does not work then I would suggest trying another proxy to see if you have better results.
Once you have set up your web proxy, you will be able to check if it works by going to Pandora. If you get the same apologetic intro that you did before then you will have to try something else (Remember to try opening Pandora in Internet Explorer first if you are using UltraSurf). But if everything goes right and you can access Pandora then congratulations! You can start exploring all that Pandora has to offer. I think you will be pleasantly surprised.
What is a proxy?
A proxy is a computer which communicates on behalf of another computer. So an anonymous proxy protects your IP address from going to the websites you visit and instead sends the IP address of the proxy. So really all you have done is added a middle man to the process.
Final Thoughts
On a side note, the idea of using a proxy to mask your IP address can be applied to video streaming sites such as Hulu and Sling which are also only available inside the US. But one thing to remember is that your internet connection speed usually drops while running through a proxy because it has to run through a remote server. So depending on your internet connection this can lead to choppy video or no video at all. In addition Hulu blocks computers running some of the popular proxies including UltraSurf. I’m not trying to scare you away from streaming video through a proxy but I’m just saying that it is a bit more difficult so be patient. Good luck!
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The only problem is, proxies get banned very quick. They’re easy to detect. Your best bet is to just buy a VPN account from a decent and reliable provider. I bought mine from http://www.hidemynet.com