Tommy Collison

Last night, after much tearing my hair out, and promising away my first-born, I finally got Spotify working.

Spotify, if you don’t know, is a streaming service that allows you to listen (stream) to music without the need to download it, per sé. It certainly removed a lot of the work, there’s no need to spend money for it in iTunes or download it from a torrent or whatever (disclaimer: I don’t condone or encourage downloading like that).

There’s a paid version as well as the free one; the latter of which is supported by ads, but these are substantially less than on radio. My reckoning is that you get a 20 second advertisement for every 10-15 songs you play. There are also ads in the main window, but if you use the internet, you should be used to these.

Alternatively, you can purchase Spotify for 9.99€, which is ad-less. For Irish people, this adds another loophole to the process: the credit card/Paypal account you use has to be from a country that Spotify’s available in: Sweden, Norway, Finland, the UK, France and Spain.

So, if you want to get Spotify here in Ireland, here’s how:

Firstly, go to http://www.daveproxy.co.uk/ and, after navigating through the ads, enter Spotify.com into the URL field.

What we’re doing here is using a proxy – something that masks your own IP address by routing your internet travels through a different server in a different country. The proxy’s server we’re using is located in the UK, which means that you can now use the Spotify website (whereas before, an annoying popup announced you weren’t in a supported country) and register.

Here’s the next hurdle: if you aren’t paying for it, you’ll need an invite code. These are only available from Premium Users, so you’ll need to beg one of your friends, do some googling or perhaps send a tweet.

After that, it’s plain sailing. You create your account, download the app and enjoy music.

I’ve been using Spotify without a hiccup for 18 hours, and I think it’s open waters from here on in. The only possible problem I can foresee is that Spotify knows I’m in Ireland now, since I’m not using a proxy between the app I downloaded and my internet connection (the other proxy we used was just for that browser window) – and I’m using this thing called Spotify Travel, where they allow you to go abroad with Spotify for up to 14 days before killing your account. We’ll have to wait and see, and we’ll solve that problem when we get to it.

Finally, major kudos to Spotify for allowing Last.FM support!

EDIT: As of March 3rd, 2011, this hack is still working for me without a hitch!