How are you people faking location to get a better price for subscriptions?

butter@midwest.social to Piracy: ꜱᴀɪʟ ᴛʜᴇ ʜɪɢʜ ꜱᴇᴀꜱ@lemmy.dbzer0.com – 90 points –

Spotify wants me to have a card from said county. I read that you can use PayPal, but they want a phone number from that country.

Any advice?

Edit: I'm aware that there are a lot of solutions to get it for free. I'm aware that I can just download my music.

Currently, I'm running running navidrome for my downloaded music and x manager Spotify for myself.

My wife has an iPhone. I don't want to download her music. But she's paying full price for Spotify.

I also like to listen from my work desktop. I have administrative rights, but it would be really dumb to download something like this to my work machine.

In several countries, I can get Spotify for like $30 dollars a year for 2 people. This price would be worth moving to legal. Especially for her, since she's paying $11 right now

58

Have you considered not Spotify?

Or just use the cracked versions if you have android

This is what I do. But my wife has an iPhone, and can't.

I also want it on desktop

I also want it on desktop

Spotify without a paid subscription on FF desktop with uBlock Origin is pretty good. It will start playing random music after a while, but it's not enough to bother me. Just refresh and you can go back to listening to your music.

You can either spoof your location and payment to India for cheap rate, or go to account share Reddit and get on someone’s family plan. Some even do family India, so it’s cheap family, at that. If you don’t have friends that do this already.

Just make sure you double check the user against the thread of scammers.

How does this help the original question?

Because Spotify bad duh, this is Lemmy we don't use bad things here.

Lol. Yes.

I download most of my music, but I haven't gotten a new song in like a year and a half, so I want cheap, desktop something for the once in a while listening.

My wife has an iPhone and pays full price, this is also motivation

She can sell the iphone and get an android with the same specs and pay for spotify for a year and have dinner somewhere /s

Just use the free plan but download whatever you plan on listening to using any of the countless tools to do exactly that.

Subscription lol is someone going to tell him?

I want to listen at work, and paying $20 a year is worth not having to get something potentially malicious

VPS running wireguard server with hardened kernel and fail2ban and an optional GeoIP blocker/full-fledged WAF. SELinux is optional.

Connect both your mobile/portable device and a segment of your home network to the same interface if you're using Wireguard, but there are ways to do it with SSL VPNs too, I'm sure. You can now stream all of your media, self-hosted, no restrictions other than outgoing bandwidth costs on the VPS.

It'll take a weekend but this is not too hard TBH. Use IaC for even faster deployments.

I'm not sure why people think this is a realistic option for most anyone. No way anyone with no experience doing any of that is setting it up in a weekend.

Not to mention it is hard to do that with music and keep up with thousands of new tracks and artists.

Look up: GitHub -> SpotX-Official/SpotX

That's my secret 😉

If you're on Android, try InnerTune via FDroid. No subscription required, easy to find music. It has reasonable recommendations for music, but not the same standards as Spotify. If you buy a DAP and microSD card, or a mobile phone that takesmicrSD cards. After that, just download any and all music you like and play anytime, anywhere without neededing a data connection.

You sir, are a legend. Never heard of InnerTune before but im playing around with it right now. I could see myself using this more than my local library. Thank you for sharing

Thanks really to the chap who similarly brought it to my attention. I use it in the car and at work.

What do you want to know? That you can use a VPN to fake your location to get a different price for a subscription? Or which county is currently the best (India has decent prices)? How to get the gift cards that you redeem in the account (Amazon, eneba, ...)?

Is a gift card the way to do it?

I thought I'd be doing a subscription.

So how do I get the gift cards?

I think Spotify blocks the usage of foreign credit cards (ie, non-Indian Credit cards). A way to circumvent this is by using gift cards. You can buy them from Amazon using the same credentials as your local Amazon account. Then it's easiest to gift them to yourself, eg, this: https://www.amazon.in/Spotify-Premium-Standard-3Month-Card/dp/B09Z6ZDKZ6

There is a limit on how many vouchers you can redeem per day (I think it's four per 24 hours) but just redeem the remaining cards the next day.

To redeem the gift cards in your account you'll have to login using an Indian VPN and then change your location. Once your location is changed, deactivate the VPN again. Then redeem the vouchers (6 3-months vouchers would give you 12 months of duo and 10 months of family). After reaching the daily limit wait 24 hours and redeem the remaining vouchers.

Once all vouchers are redeemed you can switch back to your location.

You're the best. Only one to actually answer my question.

I'll be doing this tonight. Thank you so much

no one actually answer

Create a new email using a VPN (exit lag works too) buy a giftcard or prepaid foreing visa rechargable card for that country but Giftcard is the way Create an spotify account and paid premium using that.

i did this long time with YT (india) Spotify canada (got a good deal) and Crunchy roll Turkey

Now that you mention it, my policy from now on is to avoid any Internet service that tries to charge different prices depending on what country it thinks you're in.

I mean, you're in the right place then my friend, because you're not going to subscribe to much of anything that has an international presence.

It kinda sucks when you're in one of the 'high price' countries, but there's lot of countries who wouldn't have it at all if they had to pay our prices.

lol imagine thinking regional pricing is a bad thing. Man, I wish I could be as privileged as you so I could shit on poor people for being born somewhere not as rich.

It's just another form of price discrimination, a crude attempt to extract maximum value from everyone according to their demographics. If they could charge a different price based on the size of your bank account they'd do that as well and it would be to my advantage. It makes a mockery of the idea that market price reflects the value of anything, and therefore of capitalism itself.

Price discrimation? To who, average people living in rich developed countries that can afford to pay for $10 a month for multiple services and whose salaries are at least three to four times the average of someone living in a poor developing nation?

My dude, you don't pay more, you pay the standard baseline price anyone in your situation pays. People in developing countries are lucky if they get the chance to pay the equivalent in their purchasing power and not ten times the amount while having a fraction of your wealth just because they didn't luck out their birth place. Regional pricing helps poor people get something they potentially would never have the change to get legally, it's objectively a good thing in the capitalist hellhole we live in. Without it people will have to resort to piracy and stealing, and while I don't have anything against piracy I sure as hell would love to live in a world where everyone could afford according to their needs and piracy as a necessary evil would be relegated to the past.

Price discrimination just means charging different prices to different customers based on what you think you know about them. Its benign form would be a market vendor asking higher prices of individual people who look like they can afford it, and then really fleecing the tourists who look like they'll fall for it. In that form it looks perfectly wholesome compared to what the big corporations get up to today: Supermarkets selling smaller package sizes in poor areas at lower sticker price but higher unit price, airlines asking different ticket prices depending what they know about your web browsing history, et cetera. I do not rate it a good thing overall. Even if we take it for granted that international borders are a thing, and services can't be intermediated or subjected to arbitrage, the rich man in a luxury condo in Brazil paying less for some thing than the minimum-wage worker in New York does not strike me as reflecting any kind of justice.

But this is the Internet. International borders are not supposed to be a thing here, and still aren't for the most part despite the best efforts of the most repressive governments to change that. The cost of shipping data from one side of the world to the other is effectively zero. The system where it's broadly true that different parts of the world have vastly different purchasing power is an injustice, it's not something we should be attempting to replicate in cyberspace. I can route my network packets so that they appear to be coming from any region I choose, and so can anyone who can afford Netflix in any country. It's not a freedom I want to give up so that big streaming services can extract maximum revenue from each national market separately.

I dont know if is allowed share piracy, but search for something like x manager app on duckduckgo / google

My friend, we are in a piracy community what else would we do here if it is not... Share knowledge.

Yeah, this is my current solution. I was hoping I could do cheap enough to just get legal

Don't get me wrong, and I even think I shouldn't get involved on this, but it's a bit of a waste to pay for Spotify. imo, it's a company that doesn't deserve our money, since they dont care about musicians art and pay very poorly to them. If you want something to listen offline, I recommend Tidal. In the x manager app you have this option with a modified version

IDK why'd you even bother with legal, it's easy enough to rip mp3s out of any youtube video.

these are in my ~/.zshrc:

# download any video as mp3
# if video is chaptered, split each chapter into separate song files
alias yt-mp3='yt-dlp --extract-audio --audio-format mp3 --split-chapters --no-check-certificate'

Purchase a $200 DAP + $25 SD card and some IEMs and carry all of your music offline

can you be more specific

He says, pirate the music and invest in good listening hardware.

that's even less specific

DAP - Digital Audio Player - a dedicated device for playing music. Usually will offer higher quality playback then a phone.

SD Card - Secure Digital Card - A common standard for removable flash storage

IEM - In Ear Monitors - A type of headphones

OP is saying to buy this stuff and have your music downloaded as normal files on the SD card.

1 more...
1 more...
1 more...

Download your music offline and use better hardware rather than wasting money on subscriptions

1 more...

Fun story. I never really considered myself an audiophile. At first, I downloaded every song I had as an mp3 or YouTube rip.

Then I ran out of storage space and built a music server.

Then I discovered deemix. At the time completely free

I know deemix wouldn't last. I redownloaded every song I had as flac, knowing I can't Begin to take advantage of it. Storage is cheap and I have unlimited data.

So a dap is in my future. Probably in my car. And after some research

Take a look at Hiby for the less expensive DAPs. You'll find plenty of IEMs to run off of it in whichever category of price you're looking in

1 more...