Tim Westergren, Líder de Masa

Hace algunos años las palabras "Inteligencia Artificial" estuvieron muy de moda. En realidad había mucho de Artificial y muy poco de Inteligencia. Por suerte el modelo ha evolucionado, y por ejemplo en el ámbito de la música ahora se combina cierta Inteligencia Artifiical (análisis matemático de la música) con cierta dosis de redes sociales (gustos similares de otros usuarios); para montar sitios tan increibles como pandora.com. Una emisora de radio personalizada, según tus gustos, que te propone descubrir cosas nuevas, que te van a gustar seguro por la combinación de lo anterior, y que ha hecho que no vuelva a almacenar un MP3 nunca más.
El padre de la criatura, de esta maravilla, es Tim Westergren; Tim ha mandado un a todo los usuarios para salvar el sitio. Ocurre que las discograficas siguen sin enterarse de nada y amenazan con cerrar el site a Tim (a golpe de tripicarle los pagos por derechos) cuando lo que tienen delante de las narices es un descubridor del modelo que deben seguir... Compro los comentarios de Martin V. (Fon) al respecto.

"[...]es increíble que cuando finalmente las discográficas lograron que la gente utilice un servicio que si paga derechos les extorsionen de manera tal que al final van a cerrar. Todo esto cuando Pandora es un escaparate para vender música. Lo que las discográficas no entienden es que la piratería tiene dos motivos, uno es no pagar y es importante, pero otro es la usabilidad del servicio[...]"

Este es el mensaje de Tim (lo siento pero no tengo hoy fuerzas para traducirlo):

Hi, it's Tim from Pandora,

I'm writing today to ask for your help. The survival of Pandora and all of Internet radio is in jeopardy because of a recent decision by the Copyright Royalty Board in Washington, DC to almost triple the licensing fees for Internet radio sites like Pandora. The new royalty rates are irrationally high, more than four times what satellite radio pays and broadcast radio doesn't pay these at all. Left unchanged, these new royalties will kill every Internet radio site, including Pandora.

In response to these new and unfair fees, we have formed the SaveNetRadio Coalition, a group that includes listeners, artists, labels and webcasters. I hope that you will consider joining us.

Please sign our petition urging your Congressional representative to act to save Internet radio: http://capwiz.com/saveinternetradio/issues/alert/?alertid=9631541

Please feel free to forward this link/email to your friends - the more petitioners we can get, the better.

Understand that we are fully supportive of paying royalties to the artists whose music we play, and have done so since our inception. As a former touring musician myself, I'm no stranger to the challenges facing working musicians. The issue we have with the recent ruling is that it puts the cost of streaming far out of the range of ANY webcaster's business potential.

I hope you'll take just a few minutes to sign our petition - it WILL make a difference. As a young industry, we do not have the lobbying power of the RIAA. You, our listeners, are by far our biggest and most influential allies.

As always, and now more than ever, thank you for your support.

-Tim Westergren
(Pandora founder)

ACTUALIZACIÓN 08/05/2007

Pandora deja de esta operativo para Europa ;_(

Dear Pandora listener,

Today we have some extremely disappointing news to share with you. Due to international licensing constraints, we are deeply, deeply sorry to say that we must begin proactively preventing access to Pandora's streaming service for most countries outside of the U.S.

It is difficult to convey just how disappointing this is for us. Our vision remains to eventually make Pandora a truly global service, but for the time being, we can no longer continue as we have been. As a small company, the best chance we have of realizing our dream of Pandora all around the world is to grow as the licensing landscape allows.

We show your IP address is '80.33.68.50', which indicates you are listening from Spain. If you believe you are seeing this by mistake, we offer our sincere apologies and ask that you please reply to this email.

Delivery of Pandora is based on proper licensing from the people who created the music - we have always believed in honoring the guidelines as determined by legislators and regulators, artists and songwriters, and the labels and publishers they work with. In the U.S. there is a federal statute that provides this license for all the music streamed on Pandora. Unfortunately, there is no equivalent license outside the U.S. and there is no global licensing organization to enable us to legitimately offer Pandora around the world. Other than in the U.K., we have not yet been able to make significant progress in our efforts to obtain a sufficient number of international licenses at terms that would enable us to run a viable business. The volume of listening on Pandora makes it a very expensive service to run. Streaming costs are very high, and since our inception, we have been making publishing and performance royalty payments for every song we play.

Until now, we have not been able to tell where a listener is based, relying only on zip code information provided upon registration. We are now able to recognize a listener's country of origin based on the IP address from which they are accessing the service. Consequently, on May 3rd, we will begin blocking access to Pandora to listeners from your country. We are very sad to have to do this, but there is no other alternative.

We will be posting updates on our blog regarding our ongoing effort to launch in other countries, so please stay in touch. We will keep a record of your existing stations and bookmarked artists and songs, so that when we are able to launch in your country, they will be waiting for you. We deeply share your sense of disappointment and greatly appreciate your understanding.

-Tim Westergren
(Pandora founder)