+ Pandora to block non-US listeners (via BBC)
This is sad news. Not only is Pandora a wonderful service (it's also a massive amount of fun) for music geeks (like the RS team) but it also demonstrates the power of high-quality and well organized metadata. Example? Pandora employs a team of musicians, music experts, and others to listen to each and every track on a CD and assign various attributes (what they call "musical genes").
From the Pandora site:
Together we set out to capture the essence of music at the most fundamental level. We ended up assembling literally hundreds of musical attributes or "genes" into a very large Music Genome. Taken together these genes capture the unique and magical musical identity of a song - everything from melody, harmony and rhythm, to instrumentation, orchestration, arrangement, lyrics, and of course the rich world of singing and vocal harmony. It's not about what a band looks like, or what genre they supposedly belong to, or about who buys their records - it's about what each individual song sounds like.
We can only hope the licensing issues are resolved soon. In the mean time, I would bet technically savvy users are using open proxies to access the service.
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