Spotify. All your bandwidth are belong to us?
Written on 28 Feb 2009
After several people at the Software Craftsmanship event told me how much they liked Spotify, I thought I’d give it a go. Then I looked at the terms and conditions and noticed this in “10. Advertising and use of computational resources”:
Spotify has a right to allow the Spotify Software Application and the Spotify Service to utilize the processor, bandwidth and storage hardware on your computer or other relevant device for the limited purpose of facilitating the communication and transmission of content and other data or features to you and other users of the Spotify Software Application and the Spotify Service, and to facilitate the operation of the network on which the Spotify Software Application and the Spotify Service runs.
While I’m amused that their use of my data and hardware is bundled in the same clause, does this just mean local processing and caching of their stream or does it mean I’m feeding other users peer-to-peer?
Has anyone noticed excessive load on their machines since joining?
Filed in: Grumpy Old Man.
They cache the songs on disk.
Nah, it is a P2P network, so you will almost certainly end up serving other users. http://getsatisfaction.com/spotify/topics/how_exactly_does_spotify_utilise_my_internet_connection
It’s why I’m holding back … though Skype works pretty much the same way and I use that (though I do know people whose bandwidth has been hosed by Skype ..)
I’ve noticed how online gameplay quality is drasticly reduced due to Spotify using all my upload which is just around 1mbit/sec. It is really pissing me off since I never noticed this before I started paying. My dilemma is between using Spotify and risking lag or buying/downloading more music … Imho it is a real shame it sucks ones connection this much.
I googled the problem and this page was among the first hits…
@Phil. Perhaps I should cough up for a faster connection
Hi,
From reading the Spotify boards, they plan to implement a less “naive” use of the bandwidth. They’ve alluded to monitoring network usage and sending less data if close to capacity – How exactly it’s going to determine capacity if a local network is involved, funky traffic shaping at the ISP, etc… I’m not sure.
They seem to be adverse to exposing too much control to the user (Which I can understand if not agree with – they don’t want to be stuck as a couple of streaming servers with no P2P support)
For the record it doesn’t seem to be too much of an issue for me but I do have a 20MB connection so I don’t tend to notice…