Listen to Pandora outside of the U.S.

If you liked the free Pandora streaming music service but are no longer able to tune in then this article is for you.

Pandora is a music service much like Last.fm but it is more faithful in playing artists and genres that the listener may be interested in. In short, Pandora is more compelling.

When Pandora first started out it was usable to anyone with an internet connection but the music industry objected, citing the issue of royalty payments. Agreement was finally reached for listeners in the United States, but other countries such as Ireland were SOL. Now when a listener attempts to tune in a check is made on the listener’s I.P. address, and if it is not recognized as U.S. domiciled the listener is prevented from accessing the service.

Enter Ultrareach. Ultrareach is simplicity itself. There is nothing to install, just a single executable that you click on to run.  What it does is selectively give either your Internet Explorer or Firefox browser a U.S. based I.P.

Ultrareach is a project supported by academic institutions and freedom of speech advocates to allow those in countries where content filtering is rampant to bypass that same filtering. So, it’s clean, no malware and it’s free.

My preferred way of using it is to surf the web in Firefox as I normally do, but with Ultrareach running, I use Internet Explorer to listen to Pandora, and keep the browser minimized. Streaming quality is fine and there is no delay in visiting your regular web sites or using internet services as the Explorer browser is the only program affected.

Aha! you say, perhaps I can get access to Hulu.com content too, as it too requires a U.S. based I.P. Afraid not, they’re wise to it. I’m told HotSpot Shield works fine for this purpose but I haven’t seen it for myself and I have another method of getting to Hulu. HotSpot Shield is something of a misnomer btw, it is not just for WiFi access points.

Let me know how you make out.

Tagged as: Digital Life, social, wifi, wireless