strangely dim

Pandora Radio is where I find most of my new music these days.  When I hear a song I really like for the first time, I bookmark it, and usually end up going over my bookmarks sometime later and buying a lot of the tracks on Amazon. Unfortunately, the big music companies, for reasons unfathomable to sane and rational people, are still trying their hardest to prevent anyone from buying their music, and have mandated a 6-track "skip limit" for Pandora.  Looking for new music, and already own (or dislike) the next few songs Pandora plays?  Tough – after 6 skips (12 if you switch stations), you're stuck with whatever happens to be playing.

Well, I think that's pretty stupid. If you'd like to get your 6 skips back after you've used them up, here's one way to do so.  Generic instructions for any browser first:

1. Go to the Flash Settings Manager's Website Storage Settings panel, find the entry for pandora.com, and delete it. (In case you were unaware, as most folks are, Flash plugins get their own semi-secret cookies that are not deleted when you delete regular browser cookies.)
2. Delete any normal browser cookies from the pandora.com domain.
3. Reload pandora.com.  Ta-da!

This takes advantage of the fact that Pandora allows anonymous listening for a period of time. It probably doesn't work with a registered account (because your skips can be tracked with more persistent server-side state). So you won't get to save stations, bookmark songs, etc. But if you really want to skip more than 6 times in a row, you can.  As a special bonus for Safari users on OS X, here's a bash shell one-liner that'll accomplish steps 1 and 2 for you automatically (this deletes some files and is potentially dangerous if copy/pasted incorrectly – be careful):

export PATH=/usr/libexec:$PATH && export C=$HOME/Library/Cookies/Cookies.plist && PlistBuddy -c print $C |awk '/Domain =/{x++; print x-1,$0}'|grep ".pandora.com"|cut -d ' ' -f 1|sort -rn|xargs -I "{}" PlistBuddy -c "Delete :'{}'" $C && find ~/Library/Preferences/Macromedia/Flash\ Player/\#SharedObjects -name "pandora.com"|xargs -I "{}" rm -rf {}

For the curious, Safari stores its cookies in .plist format, which can be primitively read and manipulated by a command-line utility that comes with OS X called PlistBuddy.  Due credit to this code snippet for hints on how to use it to delete cookies.  Safari's cookies are stored in ~/Library/Cookies/Cookies.plist .  Flash stores its cookies in ~/Library/Preferences/Macromedia Flash Player/#SharedObjects/ .

As far as I can tell, none of this violates Pandora's Terms of Use.  The closest prohibition is one against "[circumventing] any technology used by Pandora or its licensors to protect content accessible via the Pandora Services or the Licensed Application", but I'd really like to see someone argue with a straight face that a user cleaning out his or her browser cookies counts as "circumventing technology".  Then again, these are record companies we're talking about – if anyone would try it…