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As a long time member of the Pandora listening community I had the pleasure of participating in a Pandora town hall meeting / press event last night at the SF MOMA where the company made a number of significant announcements. I had a front row seat, with Michael Arrington sitting right behind me as he pounded out TechCrunch coverage of the event on his MacBook Pro.

The event kicked off with CEO Tim Westergren providing some really detailed background about how the roots for Pandora are deeply embedded in the Music Genome Project, which Tim and two others began working on roughly 7 years ago.

The town hall meeting format allowed a large number of questions to be asked and answered by Tim, to the delight of the crowd. Some of the answers hinted that changes at Pandora will continue apace, including a discussion about some of the recent music licensing issues faced by online radio station operators as well as potential enhancements to the Pandora service. Recently the company was forced to shut off access to the Pandora service for non-USA listeners, but it sounded like the team was hard at work trying to find a way to provide the Pandora service for rest-of-world audience, potentially with the UK being the next country to regain access. One member of the audience asked about using proxy servers to bypass the new IP filtering that Pandora has put into place, and while Tim spoke to their fiduciary responsibilities to the recording industry, requiring them to attempt to block access until a legal solution was in place, it sounded as if this could be a solution for those outside the US to regain (illegal) access to the Pandora service.

The main announcement of the night focused on the unveiling of the Pandora Everywhere Platform by CTO Tom Conrad. The new platform has been in development for a year as a secret project and will provide the basis for a slew of new possibilities that Pandora can capitalize on in the future.

The Sonos partnership is interesting, but I’ve been streaming Pandora to my home stereo using my Apple Airport Express wifi for months and it works really well for me in my little apartment. The ability to stream Pandora through phones from Sprint was a welcome addition as well, but Techcrunch and others have covered all of the specific product announcements, so go there to read more.

My main interest was with the pre-announcement of a new wifi enabled portable mp3 player that is being developed in conjunction with Zing and Sansa. This rocks and I cannot wait to get my hands on one of these suckers. The product is aimed at the burgeoning metro-wifi services provided by Google and others. It will also take advantage of the coming Wi-MAX services – “WiMAX can provide broadband wireless access (BWA) up to 30 miles (50 km) for fixed stations, and 3 – 10 miles (5 – 15 km) for mobile stations”

After the presentation I asked Tom about the possibilities that a peer-to-peer system might provide to Pandora’s new wifi systems and he was cagey about this, but admitted this might help them reduce their huge bandwidth bills. So let’s all keep an eye on this. If a peer-to-peer system was implemented there are several scenarios where the Pandora music discovery system could be enhanced and I’m going to keep my fingers crossed. Anyone care to speculate about this?