How I access Spotify in Zimbabwe

This morning I woke up to an alarming piece of news: Spotify latest to be hit by a hack on users.  Now that is a cause for concern because while I have nothing to do with Ebay( the Ogres behind PayPal) Spotify makes a good part of my world. Imagine my great surprise when my friend confessed that he is not on Spotify because he couldn’t sign up.

One of my New Year resolutions was that I would consciously curb the amount of pirated material I would knowingly consume this year. Whilst I have easily fixed the software side of piracy by using FOSS finding a legitimate music service that would cater for my wide tastes, in music was not easy from Alessandro Amoroso, James Chimombe, Beethoven to Otis Redding. Paying $0.99/track is for the rich and it is understandable why a lot of people give in to the $1/70 tracks that are offered by most down town dealers.

Spotify does not allow you to sign up from Zimbabwe and they use a Geo monitoring service to determine which country you are assessing the sign up page from. Their terms and conditions do not, however preclude you from enjoying the service. They however tell you to be mindful of the specific conditions to the actual entity you are contracting to.

In short despite how some may feel, after reading the mumbo jumbo, I safely concluded that there was really no law/provision preventing you as a Zimbabwean from enjoying the service for personal and non commercial use. Call it a grey area but it is certainly preferable to you blatantly sharing music on memory cards using torrents and Bluetooth which is most certainly evil.

Signing up for Spotify

• Visit Hola.org and install the appropriate plugin
• Visit spotify.com you will be notified that Spotify is not available in your country just ignore this. Do not try to input your email into the provided fields.
• Now this is the tricky part, you will have to choose your desired domicilium citandi et executandi. There is a list of countries here. When in doubt you choose UK. Please its a mental choice, you do not have to actually do anything at this stage.
• From the tab with the spotify.com page, click on the Hola button in your browser and select a country of your choice in our case UK.
• The page will automatically reload allowing you to sign up. If you are lazy like me you can choose to sign in using Facebook.
• You will be prompted to select your subscription model after you have signed in. The free ad supported option is fine for most users, but the premium option offers the option to download up to 3000 songs for offline playing and an ad free service. For more differences between free and premium see here.
• To begin using the service you will have to download a client of your choice. There are clients for Android(select this if you want to use your device on WiFi otherwise Econet and Co will kill you. Cannot wait for Spotify bundles though.) There are desktop clients for Windows, Ubuntu (and its babies including Mint),Fedora, Mac as well as iOS.
• Launch the client and sign in. If you choose Facebook above you will have to click on the Facebook option and enter your Facebook username and password into the client-no separate window is launched.
• Enjoy the music.#Hint you might want to check the current top track playlists first as well as create your own playlists. There are lot of premade play lists on Spotify for those with special music tastes e.g Rave hits 2012

# You only need to use DNS servers during the sign up process, Once you have signed up you can just access the service without doing anything.

Nothing in the foregoing shall be construed as to mean that you will use material in this article to violate Spotify’s terms and conditions or the applicable laws.

Picture Credit: FACT