Spotify on Debian GNU/Linux in Canada

Today I decided to try out the free ad-sponsored Spotify music streaming service. It has been available in Canada since September 2014.

After signing up you can immediately use the flash-based web player at play.spotify.com.

Installing the client app

Alternatively you can download and install the Spotify client app. I cannot say yet what the advantages or disadvantages are, maybe reading this article can be helpful.

Anyway, if you want to try the client app, for Debian (or Ubuntu) users it works like this:

  1. Add the repo key (to verify downloaded packages)
  2. Add the spotify repo to apt sources
  3. Update apt caches
  4. Install the spotify client

Here are the shell commands (requires sudo):

sudo apt-key adv --keyserver hkp://keyserver.ubuntu.com:80 --recv-keys BBEBDCB318AD50EC6865090613B00F1FD2C19886
echo deb http://repository.spotify.com stable non-free | sudo tee /etc/apt/sources.list.d/spotify.list
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install spotify-client

After successful installation you will find a “Spotify” entry in the “Multimedia” section of your start menu.

Using your Facebook login

If you use your Facebook account to sign into Spotify you will probably see this question:

Spotify would like to post to Facebook for you.
Who do you want to share these posts with?

It is safe to choose “Not Now” which prevents Spotify from posting to your timeline. The login will still work.

If your are using the downloaded stand-alone client app and the Facebook login fails with an error page, then simply enter the email address and password from your Facebook account into the login fields of the Spotify client app.

Spotify says that it only uses these credentials to pass through to the Facebook authentication and won’t store your password anywhere. I hope that’s true.

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