Comments on: Spotify online music service is pretty good

By: Eric Wroolie

Eric Wroolie — Sun, 13 Sep 2009 21:03:08 +0000

@Alex Thanks for the explanation Alex. I really like using the service, but I stopped short of joining the premium rate. For a while, I thought this could be like cloud computing with music-- why should I spend so much on disk space if I can just rent it. But, I get horrible broadband speeds in the evening here and I had a letter from Orange already about violating my fair usage policy for peak hours (like I'm supposed to be able to read the meter on how much goes out at which time). I think I'll stick to iTunes for most music.

By: Alex

Alex — Sun, 13 Sep 2009 17:45:13 +0000

Same as iPlayer et al. Spotify is a peer-to-peer distributed system, meaning it uses clients as servers: the music you download is cached, and sent on to other people listening to the same music.

It plays so fast because instead of complete files, Spotify uses small portions of music in a compressed format similar to (but far superior) to mp3. Each piece can de downloaded separately (from different peers, if need be), and only the first piece is required to kick of playing.

It does use a *lot* of bandwidth. Be wary if you by the gigabyte.