author: programming

How to hide ip: My Adventure to Accessing Spotify via a VPN service

My Adventure to Accessing Spotify via a VPN service

Posted: 27 Jul 2011 02:50 AM PDT

If you are a bit connected to social media (even if you don’t), I’m sure you’ve heard about Spotify – this online music streaming service that is only available for users in Finland, France, Norway, Netherlands, Spain, Sweden, United Kingdom and the US (at least by the time of this writing). If you’re not in one of those countries, you won’t be able to listen for free to great music (they also have premium accounts, though). That’s too bad, especially when Spotify claims to have 13 millions music available for listening, and we’re not talking about indie artists, they have big guys and gals on their list, if we only mention Beyoncé and Coldplay (just had a glance on their home page).

So you know that I am located in a place that is not part of those lucky countries. You are in the same situation too, I guess – otherwise you wouldn’t be reading this article.

But anyway, I’m just thinking that if a VPN can have me pretend that I am in New Jersey, I guess there must be a way that I can tell spotify that I’m in the US too … So let’s do it.

I launched my VPN client, then I got a US IP address. Now I can create a free spotify account. So I process, and … oops, I need to get an invitation code. While being a bit skeptical, I applied for being put on the waiting list of people who want to have an invitation to spotify.

I then browsed the internet looking for some invitation code that people may have put on forums, but, as you may guess, they are all used-invite that are worthless.

Trying to be a bit smarter, I tweeted if some people would give me a #spotify (please notice the use of the hashtag), I had two unknown people who answered me that they could give me an invite. But the trouble happened when it came to sending the invite as they requested my e-mail address. I didn’t want to give my e-mail address (well, I could have created a temporary one, but I was a bit lazy doing so), and those guys couldn’t DM me the invite, neither could I DM them as they aren’t following me on twitter – so it was a dead end (well, I could have been a bit insisting, and share a temporary address on twitter, but I didn’t want to be seen as an irresponsible twitter user who share his e-mail address to the public)

Anyway, less than one week after I applied to the waiting list, ….surprise! I received my official spotify invite. Great.

So I launched again my VPN client, got a US-based IP address, then clicked on the spotify invite link, created my account, downloaded the spotify client and …. I could listen to the whole album of “3 doors down” that they just released a few days ago …. Ain’t ~~life~~ VPN great? Yeah, I’ve got a Junk of the heart, and I’m happy.