Can Anyone access Pandora Outside the USA?

Most surfers online will probably have heard of Pandora. It’s an amazing online radio station with a difference, you choose the music. For those of us with slightly unusual tastes in their music, it is a fantastic service. It’s been developed around something called the music Genome project, it’s difficult to explain but if you’re in the US just go and try it.

For the rest of use accessing Pandora is not that simple, unfortunately dues to music licensing or stuff like that – you’ll get blocked anywhere outside the USA. In fact this has been true for years, you used to have to verify this by inputting a US ZIP code. But this wasn’t hard to fool, just pick a US Zip code somewhere and you were in.

Unfortunately this doesn’t work anymore and now your IP address is checked. When you try to access the site, the Pandora server looks up the location of your IP address if it’s non-US you get a little sorry message. It’s rather depressing when this happens and it’s becoming more and more common on the net.

But all you have to do is mask your real IP address and use one from the US and you’re in. You just have to use some sort of proxy – search online you’ll find lots of information on these. This blocks the site from checking your real location and allows you into Pandora. You have to do this every time you access which is why using a free proxy can be annoying as it sometimes takes hours to find a good one working.

There are tools to help you find them though, have a look at foxy proxy for firefox, or if you just want instant access try one of the commercial programs which are relatively inexpensive. Don’t get blocked from one of the best sites on the internet, it’s not that hard to access Pandora in Canada or Europe using a proxy.

I know these companies have licensing agreements to honour but it the internet is being increasingly blocked, filtered and censored depending on where you are. It’s not something that I’m too keen on to be honest. Better blocked from Pandora without using a workaround is nothing like the poor Chinese who are rapidly heading for a tiny State controlled Intranet.