How To Use Spotify Outside of Supported Countries

Spotify is a revolutionary music platform that lets you stream over 3.8 million songs for free right on your Windows or Mac machine. Oh, and it’s legal too! Spotify actually works with music labels, so there’s no need to feel guilty about stealing music (because you aren’t).

But there is a problem. Spotify only works in a few countries (temporary licensing issues and all that). If you’re in a supported country and you’re not using Spotify then go download it now and enjoy the best thing to ever happen to the music industry (slight exaggeration maybe, but it is really cool). For the rest of us, we have to be clever, and dare I say it, devious!

The Problem

If you try to sign up from an unsupported country you get an error message because they simply check your IP. But the desktop application itself doesn’t perform an IP address check initially. That means as long as you can get an account with Spotify you can listen to as much music as you want. Now you may be thinking “oh, that’s fine, I’ll just get a friend from the UK to make an account for me”. Slow down cowboy, you’re getting ahead of yourself.

The Solution

And without further blabbering on, here is the 5 step process on how to use Spotify outside of supported countries:

1. Go to a web based proxy from the UK. It needs to be able to post form data (not all of them can do that). lessonfly.com does the job well. If that proxy stops functioning then try searching Twitter for “spotify proxy“.
2. Enter http://www.spotify.com into the web address field on the proxy’s page.
3. When signing up, say you’re from the UK and use the post code: A9 9AA
4. Download the application. It’s available for Windows and Mac.
5. Install the application as usual, and simply login with the username and password you chose when signing up.

Important

• An automatic check is made every 14 days to verify that you’ve logged into a supported country at least once. To prevent being blocked from Spotify, use a UK proxy to login to your account via a web browser every 13 days.
• Music is streamed using P2P technology and there is no way to restrict upload bandwidth. This means if you have a bandwidth cap you could potentially run out of bandwidth really quickly. If you’re lucky your ISP may provide unlimited upload bandwidth (like iiNet from down here in Australia).
• Within the Spotify desktop application there’s an option under Preferences to access the service through a proxy. If you entered a proxy from a supported country I assume you wouldn’t need to login to the website itself anymore. I haven’t tested this myself though and I find it easy enough to just login to the site every 13 days.

Thanks again to Dr.Vrein for sharing this originally.

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