Online radio station Pandora recently closed down in the UK and has been unavailable in Europe for a while. Of course, it’s possible to access it by playing around with a proxy service but it is often complicated and unreliable. But as TechCrunch France reports, now GlobalPandora has arrived to take the headache out of the process. It even identifies you with your existing Pandora account. Of course, as soon as Pandora hears about this they will try to shut it down, no doubt spawning thousands of imitators and making the whole shut-down as pointless as it was to begin with.
GlobalPandora is also linking to a British petition to lower the price of the licenses for Internet radio stations, one of the reasons given by Pandora for cutting international access. As online radio expert James Cridland (who also happens to be at the BBC) explains in detail, running costs for radio are crippling enough for traditional radio stations – for online they can amount for as much as 94% of revenue.
Clearly the GlobalPandora site has been designed by Brits, so if you’re reading this then get in touch with TechCrunch UK as I’d like to hear more.
Update: As predicted GlobalPandora is now not working. Prior to this the developers contacted me saying “Donations are very scarce though not even covering the costs of the servers.”
Comment