Spotify & Invites
 

Heya!

Most of you probably know Spotify. For those of you who don't, it's a media player-ish program resembling the typical MP3 player that streams 160 kbps music over the internet. Lots of full albums have been made available there and playing it is just as fast as playing local files on my computer.

http://static.digitalmusicfuture.com...1--spotify.png

It's perfect when I have guests over who wants to listen to or show me some music I don't already have. That's when I use it the most. However, you can also get URLs to different songs and albums on Spotify and paste the links on a forum. People who click them will open the album or the song in the program. That makes it perfect for stuff like forum album reviews, just add links and people can have a quick listen to what you're writing about.

Link examples :

This links to the compilation album "Solen over Nannestad - Sanger om Dæhlie"
This links to a song on that album

However, although Spotify already works quite well, it's still in beta. Using it is free, but you need an invitation. Because it's handy and likely a big piece of the future of music, I thought we could collect some links here to sites that hand out invitations to Spotify for those who don't have it yet.

So if you know a site which gives away invites, paste them here and I'll add it to this post!


How to get Spotify tip #1

The norwegian site I was going to post has stopped handing out invites (I think). Instead, it says you can get an invite by following these steps (translated by yours truly) :

• Click this link
• Click "continue anyway" on the page that opens
• You should now see the Spotify registration page. If there's annoying advertisement there, you can click "fermer" to close it.
• Fill in your information. Where it says postal code, use the number : 90112
• Make sure "France" is your country (you can edit this later)
• Complete registration and create account!
• You can now download spotify and log in ..

Of course, now Spotify thinks you're french. Try logging in on the site with your new login/pass and then click the "edit profile" link up to the left. In there, you can should be able to change country to the right one.

I have my Spotify, but could someone else perhaps try this and see if it works?

And post more ways to get invites please :)


How to get Spotify tip #2

Appearantly, some guy is handing out invitations to people over Skype. Try calling user "spotify.invite" and hope he picks up!


How to get Spotify tip #3

If you have an IRC client, head to the channel #spotify on QuakeNet. Appearantly, you can get invites there. If you need help getting on the IRC (Internet Relay Chat), just check out our own thread "http://www.musicbanter.com/lounge/39...-chatroom.html".


How to get Spotify tip #4

Surf to this UK proxy service. You can enter URLs there, but first click "option" and uncheck the "Remove Scripts" option. Then write spotify.com in the URL field.

Make your account! Choose England as your country and "SW1A 2AB" as your postal code.

Haha, no replies yet .. I guess those who want Spotify already have it then!

I tried it last week but it said it's still unavailable in America, so I think a large portion of the forum won't be able to use it.

Oh crap! I didn't know it wasn't available in the US. Darn, that blows quite a bit.

Perhaps you could try one of the methods where you claim to be french or english, although spotify may still figure out where you're from.

I think they're like Amiestreet.com where they scan your IP address and determine where you're from that way.

Maybe I can Pirate Bay this?

EDIT: I found a few torrents but they are no good :(

It's not something you can "crack" I think, it's just you have to be able to register (which you need an invitation for). The program itself is only a bit more than a megabyte, I think.


I think that's why some of the methods I posted use these proxy services, to fool spotify.com into "thinking" that you're from somewhere else.

The problem is as well that since it's not a browser based thing it's hard to trick the actual console.

I'm just glad I live in the UK :D

Don't like to bring up and old thread, but does anyone use this? Although it has a lot of holes in the database where artists haven't allowed things to be put on, there is an awful lot of music on here. The adverts can be annoying (although they're short and usually once/twice an album).

I think the huge plus is the playlist function. You can create a playlist using the vast database and then share this as a link on a forum (MB for example!), whereby if another Spotify user clicks on this, the playlist will be generated in their Spotify. I think this could be a great function to share music between members as opposed to YouTube videos and downloads. It's good to listen to things before you download sometimes.

I was just wondering if anyone had this? It'd be great to start maybe a weekly or biweekly playlist sharing (similar to the music trading), as it would be easy to create the playlist and share rather than finding download links for albums, or even more difficult with individual songs!

:)

^It really is a great program/service. I've included spotify links with every album review I've written when the album in question was available on there. I did the same for me, Boo, Anteater and Comus' prog introduction thread.

The sad thing is at the moment, I don't think it's available in America.