I used a Chinese VPN to download an album with only a few thousand lifetime streams

coldrose is an artist who rebranded as Orchid and pulled their entire discography from every major streaming platform. No Spotify, no Apple Music, no Tidal. If you didn't save it when it was up, it's gone. I've been collecting their music for a while, mostly downloaded after the rebrand, but two albums from the coldrose era were still missing from my library: Excess and Machine.

Excess

Excess came together easily. SoundCloud archive accounts, people who repost music from artists that delete their catalogs, had every track reuploaded individually. I downloaded them all, pieced the album together, and ended up with a complete copy at 128kbps.

Machine

Machine has eleven tracks. I got seven from SoundCloud archives the same way, but four were nowhere to be found:

• Track 4: Hide from Me
• Track 7: Shallowheart
• Track 8: Act_2
• Track 9: Poison

I searched YouTube, Bandcamp, random music blogs, Discogs links that led to dead pages. Nothing turned up. I was ready to seed what I had on SoulSeek and call it done at seven out of eleven tracks.

Netease Cloud Music

I kept looking anyway. Half an hour later, I found the full album on Netease Cloud Music, a Chinese streaming platform I'd never heard of.

I couldn't download without the app, but I could stream tracks on the web and intercept the audio with Internet Download Manager. Three of the four missing songs downloaded fine at 128kbps, same quality as SoundCloud but three tracks I didn't have before.

The fourth, "Hide from Me," was geo-locked to China only.

Getting past the geo-lock

First I tried the technical route. Netease has an embed player for sharing songs. The working ones load audio through their internal JS. The broken one (mine) just sits there in a stopped state because the audio resource never loads. I tried extracting direct audio URLs, but their old /song/media/outer/url endpoint is dead. The new API needs their custom encryption and a Chinese IP.

I looked into UnblockNeteaseMusic, an open source proxy that intercepts Netease requests and finds songs on alternative Chinese platforms. The GitHub issues told me everything I needed to know. Broken sources, platform-specific failures, and web usage requiring HTTPS MITM with self-signed certs. Not worth the infrastructure for one song.

I tried searching other Chinese platforms directly. QQ Music needs a Chinese phone number to see results, Kugou had the track but the entire site is geo-locked outside China, and Kuwo returned nothing at all from a US IP. Migu, Bilibili, and 5sing didn't have it either.

Malus

The song had 1,520 streams on Spotify before the album was taken down, and I'd probably be the first person to ever seed it on SoulSeek if I managed to find it.

Most VPNs are designed to get you out of China, not into it. But there's a niche category of tools built for overseas Chinese users who need to access Chinese services from abroad. Malus is one of them. It routes your traffic through mainland Chinese servers, and they offer a free one-day trial.

I downloaded it, and the entire app is in Chinese. Every menu, every button, every setting. I navigated mostly by guessing and found "影音加速" (media acceleration), which seemed like the right mode and turned out to be exactly what I needed.

The Netease desktop client

With Malus running, I installed the official Netease Cloud Music desktop client, which is also entirely in Chinese. I signed up with my US phone number, which somehow worked, got a verification code, picked a random name from their generator, and I was in.

I searched for coldrose, found the album, right-clicked the track, and hit the first option in the context menu. 下载 means download. I know that now.

It downloaded in 320kbps.

I went back and re-downloaded the entire album, since every track I'd collected from SoundCloud at 128kbps was available here at 320kbps. All eleven tracks in better quality than anything I'd found anywhere else.

Seeding

The whole process took about three hours. An hour of SoundCloud archaeology, an hour of searching Chinese platforms and trying to script around geo-locks, and an hour of navigating two Chinese applications I couldn't read a single word of. I ended up just downloading the whole album from one place in better quality than anything I'd pieced together. Could've skipped straight to the Netease client and been done in twenty minutes, but you don't know that until you've tried everything else.

Both Machine and Excess are in my library now, and I'm seeding everything on SoulSeek. If you're looking for coldrose, search SoulSeek and I'll be online.