Spotify is a very popular music streaming service, it is the most used way to listen music for free. Travelers can listen their favorite songs on Spotify during their trips, songs on Spotify can be played in most regions in the world, with the exceptions of a few countries in which songs on Spotify are blocked to be played. This article will introduce the method to listen Spotify in China.
Like many other famous websites or web services, Spotify doesn’t work in China, people living or traveling in China are typically unable to listen their favorite songs and any other song on Spotify.
While other web services can’t work in China is because they are blocked by a virtual filtering system called Great Firewall, which makes those sites inaccessible, Spotify is not actually blocked, you can still access the website of Spotify, but you can’t sign in and listen music on it, instead you will only see a page with a message that says “Spotify is currently not available in you country “.
This is because Spotify has not launched service in China, as the authorities of China is unlikely to allow a foreign service to compete with their domestic music streaming services, like QQ Music, all of the country’s domestic music steaming sites are only available in Chinese, and very few songs on those sites are free to listen.
The good thing is, if you use some easy methods you can still be able to login to Spotify and play songs on it.
Spotify determines a user or visitor’s location based on the user’s IP address, if it finds a user’s IP address is belong to a country that’s not of its serviceable area, it will not allow the user to sign up or sign in and play the music on it.
So to be able to play songs on Spotify in China, you must first hide your real IP address.
IP address can be masked using VPN, which is simply an application that can be installed on smartphones and computers, once turned on, VPN will connect your device to a remote VPN server located in another country, and then connect to the open internet via that remote server, the internet traffic between your device and the VPN server will be encrypted, in this way your real IP address is hidden, the websites or web-based services will think the IP address of the VPN server is your real IP address, hence you will be able to access the content on the internet that are accessible in the country in which the VPN server is located. Below are steps to use VPN.
Step 1:
To use VPN app, you first need to sign up the VPN service on the website of a VPN provider, only then you will be able to activate VPN service within the VPN app to use it.
There are many VPN providers out there, but only a few of them can work in China, because Chinese authorities also block VPN to ensure their censorship not circumvented by citizens. In 2017, many VPNs that once can be used fine in the past lost their efficiency to bypass the censorship, due to the upgrades of Great Firewall.
In the same time, VPN providers also invented some methods to make their service work in China, such as masking the VPN traffic as appearing like normal internet traffic to avoid the block.
Below are VPN providers still can effectively bypass China’s internet censorship and access blocked web service:
NordVPN, Surfshark, ExpressVPN, VyprVPN.
Step 2 (This step may vary depending on the VPN provider you choose, but the processes are very similar): Once you signed up for the VPN service, your VPN provider will send you an Email containing a link, click the link will bring you to a page that contains the service activation code and a button to download the VPN app, then copy the activation code, which will be used later, and click the button to download the VPN app.
Step 3: Once the VPN app is downloaded and installed on your device, open the app and paste the activation code when it asks, now VPN service is activated, select a VPN server location from the list of server locations to connect. Once the VPN is connected, you can start to play and listen the songs on Spotify, as well as visiting all the websites that are blocked by Great Firewall of China.
Using VPN is not the only way to access blocked or geographically restricted content on the web, the other way to do that is using Shadowsocks, this method is not as effective and fast as using a VPN, but is a little cheaper.
Shadowsocks is a socks5 proxy software designed specifically for bypassing the block of web content in countries with internet censorship, it works similar to VPN, consisting of the client app and remote server, it also makes the geographically restricted and blocked content accessible by masking and changing the user’s real IP to another country’s.
Shadowsocks can be seen as a DIY VPN, the app of Shadowsocks is free to download and use, but you need to rent a remote server and set up the Shadowsocks server for yourself. The cost of using Shadowsocks is only half of signing up a VPN service, you only need to pay for the monthly usage of remote server. However, the process of setting up Shadowsocks on the remote server is much more complicated than the use of VPN, it requires the user to interact with the remote server through a command line interface and typing the scripts of command line. In early 2018, a Shadowsocks-based application called Outline was released, the application doesn’t contain all the functions of Shadowsocks, but it simplifies the process of setting up a Shadowsocks server, and can effectively be used to access the blocked content. By using Outline you do not need any knowledge of command line to set up a Shadowsocks. If you think VPN service is too expensive, you can click to read the steps of using Outline here.