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Spotify?

Ok, I'll give you a little bit of info about it: Spotify is a new service that allows you to listen directly to a tremendous amount of commercial music without charging you anything and in a fully legal way and in a format that's considered fully transparent (OGG Vorbis -q5). The only thing you'll sporadically encounter is a really short advertisement in between the songs (you'll get used to it and it's not like on the radio or anything).

Furthermore, you can easily point other Spotify users to songs or albums, save playlists and listen to a 'radio' that plays songs according to a filter (by year and genre) or following up on a specific artist (similar music). It's tremendously fast (instant playback), easy to use and perfect for parties
(everyone can find the song they want to listen to without having to wait!).

Good stuff, eh?
Now, let's get to the tedious (not really) preparation!
 

 

Step 1: Create an account

Currently Spotify is only available from within a handful of countries, so we gotta mimic we're in one of those (in this case, France, which guarantees you nice'n short ads in sexy French, how'bout that!).

So we're going to use a proxy server that makes it look like you're a French monsieur/madame by going to this URL (follow the instructions):

http://spotify.rejected.se/?proxy

According to the site above, you should be able to edit the country in your profile at the spotify website after creation, but for that didn't work.

NOTE: Internet Explorer 8 might give you some trouble with this, so use any other browser.
 
 

Step 2: Downloading Spotify

You can either download the installer or just the program. This is cool, because that means you can just run Spotify within a restricted (non-admin) user account, say... at a university computer.

Executable only: http://www.spotify.com/download/spotify.exe
Installer: http://www.spotify.com/download/Spotify%20Installer.exe
MAC Installer: http://www.spotify.com/download/Spotify.dmg
How to run in Linux (Wine): http://www.spotify.com/en/help/faq/wine/

Fill in your fresh user account details (and perhaps some proxy settings, depending on your internet connection) and off you go!
 
 

Step 3: No more holidays for you!

Spotify doesn't really want you to go on a holiday, or at least not for any longer than two weeks. In other words, it checks your current location and if that differs from your original sign-up location (in our case, France) for more than 14 days in a row it stops working. But... you're not living in France! Well, yeah, so we have to trick it a bit then, don't we?

We do that, again, by using a French proxy server, from inside Spotify. So go to the Spotify Preferences, find yourself a nice French proxy server from one of the pages below, set it up under Proxy and reconnect. After you successfully connected via this proxy, you can disable the proxy settings
again. Not too bad, eh?

http://www.samair.ru/proxy/socks6.htm
http://www.samair.ru/proxy/type-05.htm (and page 6)
 
 

Step 4 (optional): Wash up after yourself

Now Spotify does leave a lot of stuff behind. This shouldn't be a problem, but if you want to leave the system behind without too many traces you can remove the following in your profile folder:

Application Data\Spotify - %appdata%\Spotify
Local Settings\Spotify - %userprofile%\Local Settings\Spotify

And these registry keys are probably gonna be created:
HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\spotify
HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Classes\spotify
HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Spotify

 
 
Cheers!

Guillaume.