Pandora Radio is a popular online radio station and music discovery service where you can type the name of your favorite song (or artist) and the service will automatically create a station playing similar music. The Pandora service is free (supported by ads) though there’s a premium version as well that carries no advertising.
Pandora’s music streaming service is currently available only inside the United States, possibly due to licensing agreements, and anyone accessing Pandora outside the U.S. is redirected to the restricted page.
How to Listen to Pandora Outside United States
There are workarounds though. Since Pandora uses the IP address of a use to determine their physical (geographic) location, a person outside the U.S. can use some sort of a proxy server or a VPN to fake a US IP address and get around the block.
That involves some work and it is not always easy to find reliable proxy servers so here’s a much simpler workaround:
- If you are on Firefox, install the HTTPS Everywhere extension developed by EFF and restart the browser.
- If you are on Google Chrome, install the HTTPS Enforcer extension. Then click the extension’s icon in the Chrome address bar and set the status to enable.
- Now open the Pandora website in your browser and you should be able to use Pandora just like any other user inside the United States.
The music will stream as long as the HTTPS extension is enabled in your browser. Also, if you are on Firefox, the default settings of the extension are good enough to enjoy Pandora.
These HTTPS related extensions enable secure browsing (HTTPS) on sites that support it (including Pandora) so if you are using http://pandora.com, they will automatically redirect you to https://pandora.com. And as it turns out, the IP address based filtering is probably not active for sites that access Pandora using the secure protocol.
Picture Credit: @Tsevis.
