How to use unlimited Spotify in countries where it is not supported

You may have heard about Spotify, the ad-supported music service that will let you listen to almost any music on-demand, and a favorite of mine. Spotify is only supported in a handful of countries though, so what do you do if you go to their site only to discover that, unfortunately, the service is not supported in your country?

If that is your situation then this post is for you. It will present a step by step guide on how you can access Spotify from anywhere, using a program called Tunnelbear, which provides a a commercial Virtual Private Network that you can use to connect to the internet via a US or UK source. But this post will also tell you how to use Spotify beyond the limited free bandwidth offered by free VPN services.

Tunnelbear offers 0.5 gigs of free VPN traffic in the free version (easily extendable to 1.5 gigs if you give them a shoutout on Twitter). This, however, will not be a limiting factor for you with regard to your usage of Spotify, because I am going to let you in on a secret: once you run Spotify using your VPN connection, you’re in, and do not need the VPN anymore. You can exit the VPN and restore your internet to normal usage, and Spotify will continue to work beautifully as long as you keep it running, and until you shut it down again.

Here’s a step by step guide. It’s pretty self explanatory; the only interesting part that you have to know is in step 7

Step 1: Go to the Tunnelbear site and download their local client (available for PC or Mac).
Step 2: Go through the Tunnelbear installation and registration process
Step 3: Check your email and activate your Tunnelbear accounts
Step 4: Launch Tunnelbear and turn on the VPN service
Step 5: Participate in the ‘Twitter campaign’ for an extra 1 gig of bandwidth (optional step)
Step 6: Download and install Spotify
Step 7: Shut down Tunnelbear while ensuring that Spotify is still running.

That’s it!

Step 1: Go to the Tunnelbear site and download their local client (available for PC or Mac).

Step 2: Go through the Tunnelbear installation and registration process

This is similar to any other program, until asked for a TunnelBear account (see screenshot below), where you should select “I don’t have a TunnelBear account”.

Enter your info in the form below; use valid email address; confirm your account when you receive the confirmation email. Enter a Twitter ID here if you want to use it later on to get an extra monthly gigabyte of bandwidth in exchange for a Tweet (you could use a disposable Twitter account for this).

Next select the free version (see below)

Continue with the installation; install network connection driver. Accept installing the driver when you see the screen below

Step 3: check your email and activate your Tunnelbear account

Step 4: Launch Tunnelbear and turn on the VPN service

First off enter your email and password in the login screen that appears. Next, in the main dialog (below) select US in the right dial and switch ‘ON’ using the left dial

Step 5 (optional): participate in the ‘Twitter campaign’ for an extra 1 gig of bandwidth

Click on the “twitter campaign” banner in the main dialog (pictured above) then click ‘Tweet now!’. You will be redirected to Twitter and your extra bandwidth promptly added to your account.

Step 6: Download and install Spotify

• Go to the Spotifyweb site (make sure that Tunnelbear is on and set to USA or you will not be able to download). Download the free local client.
• Install and run the Spotify client.
• To login, you will have to use your Facebook credentials. Spotify is linked to Facebook and will require that you have a Facebook account.
• Run Spotify. It should work no matter where you are located, because it thinks you are in the US.

Step 7: Shut down Tunnelbear while ensuring that Spotify is still running

Interestingly, once the Spotify client is launched it does not check for geographic location, thus you do not need to consume your monthly Tunnelbear bandwidth to listen to music. Shut down Tunnelbear and keep Spotify running, and enjoy it’s unlimited usage from anywhere.

[Thanks go to Alaa K for taking the screenshots for this article].

Any thoughts or comments? Please share below.

Samer

Samer Kurdi has written 1078 awesome posts for Freewaregenius.

He has been reviewing software since 2006 when he started Freewaregenius.com

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