8 ms·

Practical Nerd: The hidden price of “free”

152 points by Liu 15y ago

jurre 15y ago
This doesn't really surprise me to be honest. Spotify also caches a lot in order to be able to play content as fast as it does (for me it's usually as fast as playing something from my harddrive). However I didn't know about the upstreaming of cached content, this seems like something you should be able to turn off. I have the unlimited plan, curious to see if it also happens there. Will check when I get home.
joeconway 15y ago
As someone who already pays for Spotify premium, I see the bandwidth as an acceptable further price to pay; if it results in a viable business model that can continue to entertain me. I would mind a lot more if it were just so they could save money. However, it would seem that for the sake of low-latency, the p2p layer is crucial. Also fun fact: "In total, during the measurement period, 8.8% of data came from servers, 35.8% from the peer-to-peer network, and the remaining 55.4% were cached data" Source http://www.csc.kth.se/~gkreitz/spotify-p2p10/ http://www.csc.kth.se/~gkreitz/spotify-p2p10/
- mattmanser 15y ago
  His point is that this cost is not mentioned before the point of sale and has to be discovered.
  - vegardx 15y ago
    For people outside of US, where we don't have service providers that screws us sideways, this is a negligible problem. But I can see the point for people who are routinely being scammed by their service provider.
    - pavel_lishin 15y ago
      I take it you don't live in Australia.
      - AgentConundrum 15y ago
        Canadian ISPs are pretty bad as well. Mine is decent - seems the East coast isn't as bad as the rest of the country - but this seems to be the exception, not the rule.
        nkassis 15y ago
        I have cable internet in Quebec and the cap is really low. 120gb a month is to me quite low. I watch most of my tv,news,sports online now and I have to actively monitor it. Does nothing to reduce my total bw rate usage while I'm streaming. I guess my usage drops at the end of the month. It still doesn't help their claimed problem of congestion.
        AgentConundrum 15y ago
        120GB is low, but not nearly as low as other limits I've heard of. I'm in Halifax, and the ISPs here seem pretty decent. Bell Aliant doesn't have caps at all - they used to be a distinct entity from Bell, IIRC, and are still sort of separate from the Bell that's often mentioned - and Eastlink caps at 250GB, or were planning to a few months ago anyway, but that's only for their 50 and 100 Mbps plans. The normal, standard-in-a-bundle plan is 20Mbps and is uncapped. I've been pretty pleased.
        sidek 15y ago
        Yes, the Maritimes do get good service. I've also had luck in the plains as well; Telus claims that they have caps, but they are not enforced. Shaw has caps on some plans, but not on all of them. I do find it curious that the most densely populated region is the one with the worst service.
terinjokes 15y ago
FWIW: Skype doesn't say they're using your bandwidth either...
- MJR 15y ago
  Does Skype route other people's calls through your system or transfer data off your computer to provide service to other customers? The Spotify model is very different than Skype. Edit: I had no idea Skype worked like that as well. And I have the same reaction I did when I found out through personal experience that Spotify did that -> ⌘Q - Quit Spotify. I don't need to open my connection to the world and let a program suck up all my bandwidth just to listen to some music I can get from another source. I'm not the only person using my connection and I have other devices that I want to be able to use as much bandwidth as they need. The fact that I can't control that bandwidth consumption at all is bothersome and enough of a negative in my opinion that I won't use the service.
  - davedx 15y ago
    Skype is p2p.
    - esrauch 15y ago
      Just stating that it is P2P doesn't necessarily mean this. If there were skype servers that handled everything except for the actual individual call, and the individual call was in a connection directly between two clients (not through a server) and that would be enough to be able to say "Skype is p2p".
      - davedx 15y ago
        http://lmgtfy.com/?q=skype+p2p+architecture http://lmgtfy.com/?q=skype+p2p+architecture
        esrauch 15y ago
        I don't think you understood my comment. I was simply stating that "Skype is P2P" is not a statement that is at all relevant to the conversation is above, it could be P2P and still not use your bandwidth when you are not actively using it.
rjh29 15y ago
As a Spotify Premium subscriber, I think it is unacceptable that Spotify do not allow you to disable or throttle Spotify's upstream traffic, or even disclose how much bandwidth it is likely to use! I have an uncapped connection (common in the UK) but anyone on a capped line may be subjected to hefty fees without even realising it. I have no issue with the idea of P2P - it saves Spotify money, which is hopefully transferred to me - and is essential for instant or near-instant playback of music.
- sleepyhead 15y ago
  Unacceptable? Well you are paying for it so clearly it is acceptable to you. They could have designed their service in another way but then you would have to 1) wait longer for songs to buffer before playing 2) pay more as their costs would be higher.
- Confusion 15y ago
  This is also my number one complaint. I asked about it at their official support forum on getsatisfaction, but never got a response. That's silly, because Spotify sometimes saturated my upstream, in which case I turned it off. It has now become a habit to turn it off. Before that, most of the time, it was one when I wasn't even listening to music, so the bandwidth was completely free to them. If they would allow me to throttle it somewhat, they could use it all the time. Since they don't allow me to throttle it, I've turned to shutting the client down whenever I'm not using it.
hackermom 15y ago
Well, no surprise there. It was stated and elaborated already from the start years ago - Spotify is a cloud service, and the users help out. What IS surprising is that there are no numbers what so ever about how much bandwidth and how many connections that might be in use on a client's computer.
- joeconway 15y ago
  "The client simultaneously uploads to at most 4 peers." I've never seen anything regarding how much bandwidth is used though.
- tantalor 15y ago
  > Spotify is a cloud service That much was well known, but never has a "cloud service" meant that the users were the cloud. That's P2P, a completely different paradigm.
- smackfu 15y ago
  It doesn't seem to actually say that anywhere on the web page though.
  - joeconway 15y ago
    I understand the point you're making, they should say explicitly on their website. But to source my comment: http://www.csc.kth.se/~gkreitz/spotify-p2p10/ http://www.csc.kth.se/~gkreitz/spotify-p2p10/
MattBearman 15y ago
I haven't tried this yet, but as a premium subscriber, I'm pretty sure I could save songs as an offline playlist, and then set Spotify to offline mode.
- peteretep 15y ago
  Yes, as long as you reconnect every 30 days.
- nlco 15y ago
  How do you set spotify to offline mode (without completely disabling wifi)?
  - adeaver 15y ago
    You can't set spotify itself to offline except on the phone app. You can however set a specific playlist to offline mode which will 'sync' the music to your HDD and plays it from there. [edit]: BTW, you can do this on all devices.
pointyhat 15y ago
It does that - it's a P2P system. It also eats tonnes of disk space. My spotify data folder is about 12 gig.
- barrym 15y ago
  You can change how much disk space it uses in the settings.
- vegardx 15y ago
  Yes, by default Spotify caches everything up to 10% of your total free disk space. This is space that you are not using anyway, so what is the problem? It makes playback of music you've listened to in the past a lot faster, and saves you downstream bandwidth - which in turn makes for less load on servers and the swarm.
  - pointyhat 15y ago
    Exactly. Works fine for me :) I wasn't complaining.
  - jarofgreen 15y ago
    "This is space that you are not using anyway, so what is the problem?" It's space your not using now. What if the user has no idea Spotify is caching that heavily, then checks their Free Disk Space (maybe they are about to transfer lots of data)? Nasty surprise ...
- wnight 15y ago
  p2p is unrelated to (these) caching strategies. They'd do the same if it was all centralized. Why not just download a huge bunch of songs using bit torrent and pretend to be using Spotify? No partially cached songs, no proprietary anything, etc.
vegardx 15y ago
And this is why you never-ever want to release a good product to the US. If it works great in EU and the rest of the world, you can be damn sure that you will meet so much hate in US, for some obscure reason. Well - from a personal perspective. I've been running Spotify since early beta, and monitor the network usage of all my application, both when it comes to traffic and when it comes to what it accesses (littlesnitch is a great tool!). Spotify hardly uses any upstream bandwidth, and if it were using a lot, I should've seen that. I see a lot of downstream network usage. This is just another blogger to piss on Spotify for some strange reason, to the point where they make up stuff. And it does not make sense to enable the user to not have any caching, then the network usage of the entire swarm would've quadrupled. I feel that 1GB minimum and standard at 10% of free diskspace (!!!! free, not total) is a good middle road. (For those interested, Skype uses a boatload more bandwidth than Spotify. We've had problems with network congestion because so many clients on the network had Skype open and they routed so many calls through our network.)
- nuclear_eclipse 15y ago
  For another anecdote, on my $70/mo cable connection, I have a total of 768k for my upload bandwidth, and Spotify saturates my connection so much that I literally cannot watch something on Netflix with my PS3 or Roku box until I have quit the Spotify client on my desktop. And speaking as a paying customer ($20/mo so my wife and I can each have mobile access), it would be really nice if I could at least choose a limit on the P2P bandwidth so that I wouldn't be forced to close it altogether.
- bkhughes 15y ago
  >This is just another blogger to piss on Spotify for some strange reason to the point where they make up stuff. Actually he discusses his reason, right there in the post. Spotify used a lot of his bandwidth with no way to throttle (as others on this thread have discussed), in a way that he didn't feel was disclosed up-front. It's great that you love Spotify and get value from it, but don't jump on this board calling someone a liar and questioning their integrity because they don't get the same value from it.
  - 15y ago
apgwoz 15y ago
Yup. This helps power the "instant" playback that I'm sure the author has enjoyed. Saving money on bandwidth, I'm sure, also helps them pay for all of the licensing agreements they have with the recording industry so that you can stream that impressively large catalog for free.
- dfxm12 15y ago
  "...the problem wasn’t so much the eventual price I paid as much as the fact that the true cost wasn’t clear until after I’d committed." All the author is advocating is for software companies to be up front about what their software is doing.
  - apgwoz 15y ago
    From clause 13 in the Terms of Service: (ii) 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. Granted, it's not listed as a "feature" but you agreed to the possibility of it.
- jmilloy 15y ago
  Does the author expect the service to stay free and also remove the p2p features that make it work? Okay, yeah, sort of because he wants to be able to limit bandwidth. But not really. Rather than complaining about upstream traffic, he complains that Spotify should make the non-monetary costs clear upfront. This is the point of the post - there is a cost to "free" as we all know, and here is one good example. There's nothing wrong if a service is p2p, it should just tell you. Barring that, users of any "free" service ought to keep in mind that it might cost them in other ways.
  - smackfu 15y ago
    Even if you pay, it's still P2P.
pgvoorhees 15y ago
Just a suggestion. You could try installing something called "netbalancer" by seriousbit (http://seriousbit.com/netbalancer/ http://seriousbit.com/netbalancer/ assuming you're on windows). It allows you to throttle network usage per program.
- dmarinoc 15y ago
  Anything similar for OSX?
  - wulczer 15y ago
    ipfw :o)
mmuro 15y ago
So, the solution is to quit the app, right? Simple enough. I only use it when I need variety that's not in my iTunes.
- jmilloy 15y ago
  This seems like an adequate solution. It makes me wonder if some time there will be streaming music services that require you to have the program running for at least a minimum of hours a day in order to receive the free service. Or better yet, perhaps a discount for meeting monthly upload quotas.
jamesgagan 15y ago
A good reason to try http://songspin.fm http://songspin.fm - nothing to install, just stream cool music continually in your browser.
ristretto 15y ago
The article isn't just about spotify, but anyway, bandwidth usage is a concern now, but certainly as bandwidth goes up there will be more and more services taking advantage of P2P for faster and better service. It's not necessarily a bad thing.
xbryanx 15y ago
If you object to the P2P aspects of Spotify, wouldn't it be pretty simple to find out the port that it's broadcasting on and block outgoing communication? I wonder if anyone has tried this. Maybe Spotify would notice and quit playing.
fredBuddemeyer 15y ago
"No “free” streaming service is worth the risk of pissing off the Xfinity limit police and losing my Internet service." this is only a true statement if the value of your current service is infinite or your risk aversion is. to make any kind of realistic logical statement about this you need to calculate how much bandwidth is being used, user limits and isp switching costs. a nice insight turned into fear mongering - this is how a lot of bad memes start.
- AgentConundrum 15y ago
  Considering how in a surprising number of places there is only one broadband ISP available, it's not exactly unreasonable - though I'll agree it's hyperbolic - to say that the value of his current service is 'infinite', since internet access - at least in the developed world - is fairly important. Have you used dial-up internet lately? It's not really a fun experience. (n.b. I've not used dial-up in a while, but my mother has a bad DSL line that tests at around 0.2Mbps, and I was not amused by it the last time I was there. This is my basis of comparison.) If spotify is silently operating a P2P client, even when it's not being directly used, then that's an issue for people with bandwidth restrictions. It's trivial to get distracted by something, forget an application is running when you leave the house, and end up using much more bandwidth than you intended. It's worse still that as bandwidth increases, usage limits don't stay proportional. You suddenly have the ability to share faster, reaching your limit sooner. As I said, I agree that the statement is hyperbolic, but I don't consider the issue trivial.
- jws 15y ago
  I don't think you are in control of how much bandwidth is being used when you invite someone else's software to use your machine as a server. The streaming service could change at any time and run your connection full speed for an indefinite period.
flexd 15y ago
Spotify is a peer to peer music streaming service, haven't they been pretty clear about that previously? I actually can't find any information about it on the website at the moment but I'm positive it's been there before. I have been a member since the early beta (i.e when only certain parts of Europe had access) so they might have changed it since then. I've never noticed any slowdowns though and since we don't have bandwidth caps over here it hasn't really become a issue for anyone. I'm a premium subscribed now but I used the free service up until they limited the amount of plays per song and how long per month you could use it, and for me it's worth the $18~ I have to pay to get access to the music I want to listen to anywhere. Even if there is some bandwidth usage if I keep it running. It's never so much that I notice it in any way and it "gives" when other applications demand more bandwidth. How often do you actually have Spotify running without listening to music anyway?
- ryusage 15y ago
  As to your last question, it's actually pretty much always running, listening or not. At least in my installation, clicking the X to close the window actually (by default) just minimizes it; to really close the application, you have to use a context menu or something. That alone is enough of a hurdle that I rarely bother to close it...on the assumption that it's not hogging too many resources. I'm wondering how safe that assumption really was now.
  - flexd 15y ago
    I just CMD+Q to quit it (on OSX) which as far as I know does in fact close it properly. In any case I make sure to close programs I do not use.
    - jarin 15y ago
      I do not believe it does quit it properly on OS X. Even after a fresh reboot, Spotify appeared to be using about 40k/sec outbound bandwith. After I removed it, idle bandwidth dropped to zero. I also noticed something strange when removing it with CleanMyMac (similar to AppZapper). There's a separate dock icon file for Spotify, and removing it restarted Dock.app. I think that might be to cover up Spotify running in the background somehow.
antonp 15y ago
A month worth of Spotify premium usage will result in this amount of traffic : http://imgur.com/wVdmS http://imgur.com/wVdmS (screenshot from my network traffic monitor) I completely agree with the poster who said that this is an acceptable price to pay for the awesome UX we're getting.
- ralphc 15y ago
  How much do you listen a day, on average, to use that bandwidth?
  - antonp 15y ago
    5 - 7 hours easily. This is not the high quality stream though. And by awesome UX I was mostly referring to nearly latency free track skipping.
- jarin 15y ago
  Spotify's UX is okay, I wouldn't really call it awesome. I mean it's got all the music player basics (playlists, search, etc), but there are almost no music discovery features and the social stuff is pretty lacking.
huhtenberg 15y ago
Sounds like he is yet to be shocked to discover why Skype is free :) On a more serious note, Adobe Flash Player 10 comes equipped with P2P streaming meshwork, which is enabled by default and which will cause the exact same bandwidth bleed as described in article. Being behind NAT or a firewall is not enough to prevent one from being a relay node as it includes fairly sophisticated NAT traversal logic and NAT-to-NAT connectivity stuff. The only way to NOT donate bandwidth with FP10 is to disable "peer assisted networking" in Flash Settings, which in itself is done by loading a Flash applet from Adobe's site. This also makes using FlashBlock in a browser pretty much a must have. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Real_Time_Media_Flow_Protocol http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Real_Time_Media_Flow_Protocol
- tantalor 15y ago
  > Sounds like he is yet to be shocked to discover why Skype is free :) Skype isn't riddled with ads.
  - valisystem 15y ago
    But its business relies on selling your bandwidth.
    - brettnak 15y ago
      What do you mean? Selling bandwidth how? I really am curious here.
      - Maakuth 15y ago
        All the calls are P2P, and if the peers cannot connect directly, the calls are routed through someone else's computer that's called a supernode. Pretty much none of the actual VoIP traffic touches Skype's servers.
  - 18pfsmt 15y ago
    While I'm not sure if it counts as "riddled with ads," Skype is certainly moving in the direction of ads: http://blogs.skype.com/en/2011/03/advertising.html http://blogs.skype.com/en/2011/03/advertising.html
reagan83 15y ago
I believe there is a really simple solution to this. Spotify is only using your network bandwidth to serve your music files that other people want to play. If you don't want to participate move your music folders to another location that Spotify cannot find.
- jkterhune 15y ago
  Interesting, I assumed that Spotify just distributes data that originated on its own servers. If distributes music I've ripped myself, I could screw up its service for other listeners. Does anyone know what the behavior is?
yason 15y ago
It took me a while to get rid of the thought pattern superimposed by the title, including the words "nerd" and "free", that the article would be of the impractical sides of using free software (such as having to occasionally tweak around miscellaneous problems related to compatibility with proprietary software).
deleted 15y ago
[deleted]
DanBealeC 15y ago
disturbing that so many HN readers install software without knowing what it does, or how it does it. Having sad that, the docs could be a bit more clear. For example, Spotify says quite clearly in sentence ii of para 14 of the end-user-agreement that "(ii) 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. You may adjust the level of usage that the Spotify Service makes of your computer in the settings of the Spotify Software Application."
- seattlenerd 15y ago
  Considering the first indication of possible P2P functionality in the license agreement is the phrase "and other users," Spotify could be more upfront.
hammock 15y ago
Whoever edited the title of this submission (it used to be "when Spotify wasn’t playing audio, it was using my network connection. A lot.") just took the whole thread out of context. This was never about the blog post, it was about the specific paragraph referencing Spotify and its P2P-ness.
- planckscnst 15y ago
  The people editing the titles just to match the original source are driving me nuts. I don't care how cute or clever the author was in picking a title. I want to know what the damn thing is about so I can make a good decision whether or not to spend time reading it! A good HN title should efficiently communicate to me why I should click on this link. The original title was interesting. This one is not: the only reason I clicked on it again was because it had a high number of votes and comments.

152 points by Liu 15y ago

jurre 15y ago

This doesn't really surprise me to be honest. Spotify also caches a lot in order to be able to play content as fast as it does (for me it's usually as fast as playing something from my harddrive). However I didn't know about the upstreaming of cached content, this seems like something you should be able to turn off. I have the unlimited plan, curious to see if it also happens there. Will check when I get home.

joeconway 15y ago

As someone who already pays for Spotify premium, I see the bandwidth as an acceptable further price to pay; if it results in a viable business model that can continue to entertain me. I would mind a lot more if it were just so they could save money. However, it would seem that for the sake of low-latency, the p2p layer is crucial. Also fun fact: "In total, during the measurement period, 8.8% of data came from servers, 35.8% from the peer-to-peer network, and the remaining 55.4% were cached data" Source http://www.csc.kth.se/~gkreitz/spotify-p2p10/ http://www.csc.kth.se/~gkreitz/spotify-p2p10/

mattmanser 15y ago
His point is that this cost is not mentioned before the point of sale and has to be discovered.
- vegardx 15y ago
  For people outside of US, where we don't have service providers that screws us sideways, this is a negligible problem. But I can see the point for people who are routinely being scammed by their service provider.
  - pavel_lishin 15y ago
    I take it you don't live in Australia.
    - AgentConundrum 15y ago
      Canadian ISPs are pretty bad as well. Mine is decent - seems the East coast isn't as bad as the rest of the country - but this seems to be the exception, not the rule.
      - nkassis 15y ago
        I have cable internet in Quebec and the cap is really low. 120gb a month is to me quite low. I watch most of my tv,news,sports online now and I have to actively monitor it. Does nothing to reduce my total bw rate usage while I'm streaming. I guess my usage drops at the end of the month. It still doesn't help their claimed problem of congestion.
        AgentConundrum 15y ago
        120GB is low, but not nearly as low as other limits I've heard of. I'm in Halifax, and the ISPs here seem pretty decent. Bell Aliant doesn't have caps at all - they used to be a distinct entity from Bell, IIRC, and are still sort of separate from the Bell that's often mentioned - and Eastlink caps at 250GB, or were planning to a few months ago anyway, but that's only for their 50 and 100 Mbps plans. The normal, standard-in-a-bundle plan is 20Mbps and is uncapped. I've been pretty pleased.
        sidek 15y ago
        Yes, the Maritimes do get good service. I've also had luck in the plains as well; Telus claims that they have caps, but they are not enforced. Shaw has caps on some plans, but not on all of them. I do find it curious that the most densely populated region is the one with the worst service.

terinjokes 15y ago

FWIW: Skype doesn't say they're using your bandwidth either...

MJR 15y ago
Does Skype route other people's calls through your system or transfer data off your computer to provide service to other customers? The Spotify model is very different than Skype. Edit: I had no idea Skype worked like that as well. And I have the same reaction I did when I found out through personal experience that Spotify did that -> ⌘Q - Quit Spotify. I don't need to open my connection to the world and let a program suck up all my bandwidth just to listen to some music I can get from another source. I'm not the only person using my connection and I have other devices that I want to be able to use as much bandwidth as they need. The fact that I can't control that bandwidth consumption at all is bothersome and enough of a negative in my opinion that I won't use the service.
- davedx 15y ago
  Skype is p2p.
  - esrauch 15y ago
    Just stating that it is P2P doesn't necessarily mean this. If there were skype servers that handled everything except for the actual individual call, and the individual call was in a connection directly between two clients (not through a server) and that would be enough to be able to say "Skype is p2p".
    - davedx 15y ago
      http://lmgtfy.com/?q=skype+p2p+architecture http://lmgtfy.com/?q=skype+p2p+architecture
      - esrauch 15y ago
        I don't think you understood my comment. I was simply stating that "Skype is P2P" is not a statement that is at all relevant to the conversation is above, it could be P2P and still not use your bandwidth when you are not actively using it.

rjh29 15y ago

As a Spotify Premium subscriber, I think it is unacceptable that Spotify do not allow you to disable or throttle Spotify's upstream traffic, or even disclose how much bandwidth it is likely to use! I have an uncapped connection (common in the UK) but anyone on a capped line may be subjected to hefty fees without even realising it. I have no issue with the idea of P2P - it saves Spotify money, which is hopefully transferred to me - and is essential for instant or near-instant playback of music.

sleepyhead 15y ago
Unacceptable? Well you are paying for it so clearly it is acceptable to you. They could have designed their service in another way but then you would have to 1) wait longer for songs to buffer before playing 2) pay more as their costs would be higher.
Confusion 15y ago
This is also my number one complaint. I asked about it at their official support forum on getsatisfaction, but never got a response. That's silly, because Spotify sometimes saturated my upstream, in which case I turned it off. It has now become a habit to turn it off. Before that, most of the time, it was one when I wasn't even listening to music, so the bandwidth was completely free to them. If they would allow me to throttle it somewhat, they could use it all the time. Since they don't allow me to throttle it, I've turned to shutting the client down whenever I'm not using it.

hackermom 15y ago

Well, no surprise there. It was stated and elaborated already from the start years ago - Spotify is a cloud service, and the users help out. What IS surprising is that there are no numbers what so ever about how much bandwidth and how many connections that might be in use on a client's computer.

joeconway 15y ago
"The client simultaneously uploads to at most 4 peers." I've never seen anything regarding how much bandwidth is used though.
tantalor 15y ago
> Spotify is a cloud service That much was well known, but never has a "cloud service" meant that the users were the cloud. That's P2P, a completely different paradigm.
smackfu 15y ago
It doesn't seem to actually say that anywhere on the web page though.
- joeconway 15y ago
  I understand the point you're making, they should say explicitly on their website. But to source my comment: http://www.csc.kth.se/~gkreitz/spotify-p2p10/ http://www.csc.kth.se/~gkreitz/spotify-p2p10/

MattBearman 15y ago

I haven't tried this yet, but as a premium subscriber, I'm pretty sure I could save songs as an offline playlist, and then set Spotify to offline mode.

peteretep 15y ago
Yes, as long as you reconnect every 30 days.
nlco 15y ago
How do you set spotify to offline mode (without completely disabling wifi)?
- adeaver 15y ago
  You can't set spotify itself to offline except on the phone app. You can however set a specific playlist to offline mode which will 'sync' the music to your HDD and plays it from there. [edit]: BTW, you can do this on all devices.

pointyhat 15y ago

It does that - it's a P2P system. It also eats tonnes of disk space. My spotify data folder is about 12 gig.

barrym 15y ago
You can change how much disk space it uses in the settings.
vegardx 15y ago
Yes, by default Spotify caches everything up to 10% of your total free disk space. This is space that you are not using anyway, so what is the problem? It makes playback of music you've listened to in the past a lot faster, and saves you downstream bandwidth - which in turn makes for less load on servers and the swarm.
- pointyhat 15y ago
  Exactly. Works fine for me :) I wasn't complaining.
- jarofgreen 15y ago
  "This is space that you are not using anyway, so what is the problem?" It's space your not using now. What if the user has no idea Spotify is caching that heavily, then checks their Free Disk Space (maybe they are about to transfer lots of data)? Nasty surprise ...
wnight 15y ago
p2p is unrelated to (these) caching strategies. They'd do the same if it was all centralized. Why not just download a huge bunch of songs using bit torrent and pretend to be using Spotify? No partially cached songs, no proprietary anything, etc.

vegardx 15y ago

And this is why you never-ever want to release a good product to the US. If it works great in EU and the rest of the world, you can be damn sure that you will meet so much hate in US, for some obscure reason. Well - from a personal perspective. I've been running Spotify since early beta, and monitor the network usage of all my application, both when it comes to traffic and when it comes to what it accesses (littlesnitch is a great tool!). Spotify hardly uses any upstream bandwidth, and if it were using a lot, I should've seen that. I see a lot of downstream network usage. This is just another blogger to piss on Spotify for some strange reason, to the point where they make up stuff. And it does not make sense to enable the user to not have any caching, then the network usage of the entire swarm would've quadrupled. I feel that 1GB minimum and standard at 10% of free diskspace (!!!! free, not total) is a good middle road. (For those interested, Skype uses a boatload more bandwidth than Spotify. We've had problems with network congestion because so many clients on the network had Skype open and they routed so many calls through our network.)

nuclear_eclipse 15y ago
For another anecdote, on my $70/mo cable connection, I have a total of 768k for my upload bandwidth, and Spotify saturates my connection so much that I literally cannot watch something on Netflix with my PS3 or Roku box until I have quit the Spotify client on my desktop. And speaking as a paying customer ($20/mo so my wife and I can each have mobile access), it would be really nice if I could at least choose a limit on the P2P bandwidth so that I wouldn't be forced to close it altogether.
bkhughes 15y ago
>This is just another blogger to piss on Spotify for some strange reason to the point where they make up stuff. Actually he discusses his reason, right there in the post. Spotify used a lot of his bandwidth with no way to throttle (as others on this thread have discussed), in a way that he didn't feel was disclosed up-front. It's great that you love Spotify and get value from it, but don't jump on this board calling someone a liar and questioning their integrity because they don't get the same value from it.
- 15y ago

apgwoz 15y ago

Yup. This helps power the "instant" playback that I'm sure the author has enjoyed. Saving money on bandwidth, I'm sure, also helps them pay for all of the licensing agreements they have with the recording industry so that you can stream that impressively large catalog for free.

dfxm12 15y ago
"...the problem wasn’t so much the eventual price I paid as much as the fact that the true cost wasn’t clear until after I’d committed." All the author is advocating is for software companies to be up front about what their software is doing.
- apgwoz 15y ago
  From clause 13 in the Terms of Service: (ii) 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. Granted, it's not listed as a "feature" but you agreed to the possibility of it.
jmilloy 15y ago
Does the author expect the service to stay free and also remove the p2p features that make it work? Okay, yeah, sort of because he wants to be able to limit bandwidth. But not really. Rather than complaining about upstream traffic, he complains that Spotify should make the non-monetary costs clear upfront. This is the point of the post - there is a cost to "free" as we all know, and here is one good example. There's nothing wrong if a service is p2p, it should just tell you. Barring that, users of any "free" service ought to keep in mind that it might cost them in other ways.
- smackfu 15y ago
  Even if you pay, it's still P2P.

pgvoorhees 15y ago

Just a suggestion. You could try installing something called "netbalancer" by seriousbit (http://seriousbit.com/netbalancer/ http://seriousbit.com/netbalancer/ assuming you're on windows). It allows you to throttle network usage per program.

dmarinoc 15y ago
Anything similar for OSX?
- wulczer 15y ago
  ipfw :o)

mmuro 15y ago

So, the solution is to quit the app, right? Simple enough. I only use it when I need variety that's not in my iTunes.

jmilloy 15y ago
This seems like an adequate solution. It makes me wonder if some time there will be streaming music services that require you to have the program running for at least a minimum of hours a day in order to receive the free service. Or better yet, perhaps a discount for meeting monthly upload quotas.

jamesgagan 15y ago

A good reason to try http://songspin.fm http://songspin.fm - nothing to install, just stream cool music continually in your browser.

ristretto 15y ago

The article isn't just about spotify, but anyway, bandwidth usage is a concern now, but certainly as bandwidth goes up there will be more and more services taking advantage of P2P for faster and better service. It's not necessarily a bad thing.

xbryanx 15y ago

If you object to the P2P aspects of Spotify, wouldn't it be pretty simple to find out the port that it's broadcasting on and block outgoing communication? I wonder if anyone has tried this. Maybe Spotify would notice and quit playing.

fredBuddemeyer 15y ago

"No “free” streaming service is worth the risk of pissing off the Xfinity limit police and losing my Internet service." this is only a true statement if the value of your current service is infinite or your risk aversion is. to make any kind of realistic logical statement about this you need to calculate how much bandwidth is being used, user limits and isp switching costs. a nice insight turned into fear mongering - this is how a lot of bad memes start.

AgentConundrum 15y ago
Considering how in a surprising number of places there is only one broadband ISP available, it's not exactly unreasonable - though I'll agree it's hyperbolic - to say that the value of his current service is 'infinite', since internet access - at least in the developed world - is fairly important. Have you used dial-up internet lately? It's not really a fun experience. (n.b. I've not used dial-up in a while, but my mother has a bad DSL line that tests at around 0.2Mbps, and I was not amused by it the last time I was there. This is my basis of comparison.) If spotify is silently operating a P2P client, even when it's not being directly used, then that's an issue for people with bandwidth restrictions. It's trivial to get distracted by something, forget an application is running when you leave the house, and end up using much more bandwidth than you intended. It's worse still that as bandwidth increases, usage limits don't stay proportional. You suddenly have the ability to share faster, reaching your limit sooner. As I said, I agree that the statement is hyperbolic, but I don't consider the issue trivial.
jws 15y ago
I don't think you are in control of how much bandwidth is being used when you invite someone else's software to use your machine as a server. The streaming service could change at any time and run your connection full speed for an indefinite period.

flexd 15y ago

Spotify is a peer to peer music streaming service, haven't they been pretty clear about that previously? I actually can't find any information about it on the website at the moment but I'm positive it's been there before. I have been a member since the early beta (i.e when only certain parts of Europe had access) so they might have changed it since then. I've never noticed any slowdowns though and since we don't have bandwidth caps over here it hasn't really become a issue for anyone. I'm a premium subscribed now but I used the free service up until they limited the amount of plays per song and how long per month you could use it, and for me it's worth the $18~ I have to pay to get access to the music I want to listen to anywhere. Even if there is some bandwidth usage if I keep it running. It's never so much that I notice it in any way and it "gives" when other applications demand more bandwidth. How often do you actually have Spotify running without listening to music anyway?

ryusage 15y ago
As to your last question, it's actually pretty much always running, listening or not. At least in my installation, clicking the X to close the window actually (by default) just minimizes it; to really close the application, you have to use a context menu or something. That alone is enough of a hurdle that I rarely bother to close it...on the assumption that it's not hogging too many resources. I'm wondering how safe that assumption really was now.
- flexd 15y ago
  I just CMD+Q to quit it (on OSX) which as far as I know does in fact close it properly. In any case I make sure to close programs I do not use.
  - jarin 15y ago
    I do not believe it does quit it properly on OS X. Even after a fresh reboot, Spotify appeared to be using about 40k/sec outbound bandwith. After I removed it, idle bandwidth dropped to zero. I also noticed something strange when removing it with CleanMyMac (similar to AppZapper). There's a separate dock icon file for Spotify, and removing it restarted Dock.app. I think that might be to cover up Spotify running in the background somehow.

antonp 15y ago

A month worth of Spotify premium usage will result in this amount of traffic : http://imgur.com/wVdmS http://imgur.com/wVdmS (screenshot from my network traffic monitor) I completely agree with the poster who said that this is an acceptable price to pay for the awesome UX we're getting.

ralphc 15y ago
How much do you listen a day, on average, to use that bandwidth?
- antonp 15y ago
  5 - 7 hours easily. This is not the high quality stream though. And by awesome UX I was mostly referring to nearly latency free track skipping.
jarin 15y ago
Spotify's UX is okay, I wouldn't really call it awesome. I mean it's got all the music player basics (playlists, search, etc), but there are almost no music discovery features and the social stuff is pretty lacking.

huhtenberg 15y ago

Sounds like he is yet to be shocked to discover why Skype is free :) On a more serious note, Adobe Flash Player 10 comes equipped with P2P streaming meshwork, which is enabled by default and which will cause the exact same bandwidth bleed as described in article. Being behind NAT or a firewall is not enough to prevent one from being a relay node as it includes fairly sophisticated NAT traversal logic and NAT-to-NAT connectivity stuff. The only way to NOT donate bandwidth with FP10 is to disable "peer assisted networking" in Flash Settings, which in itself is done by loading a Flash applet from Adobe's site. This also makes using FlashBlock in a browser pretty much a must have. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Real_Time_Media_Flow_Protocol http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Real_Time_Media_Flow_Protocol

tantalor 15y ago
> Sounds like he is yet to be shocked to discover why Skype is free :) Skype isn't riddled with ads.
- valisystem 15y ago
  But its business relies on selling your bandwidth.
  - brettnak 15y ago
    What do you mean? Selling bandwidth how? I really am curious here.
    - Maakuth 15y ago
      All the calls are P2P, and if the peers cannot connect directly, the calls are routed through someone else's computer that's called a supernode. Pretty much none of the actual VoIP traffic touches Skype's servers.
- 18pfsmt 15y ago
  While I'm not sure if it counts as "riddled with ads," Skype is certainly moving in the direction of ads: http://blogs.skype.com/en/2011/03/advertising.html http://blogs.skype.com/en/2011/03/advertising.html

reagan83 15y ago

I believe there is a really simple solution to this. Spotify is only using your network bandwidth to serve your music files that other people want to play. If you don't want to participate move your music folders to another location that Spotify cannot find.

jkterhune 15y ago
Interesting, I assumed that Spotify just distributes data that originated on its own servers. If distributes music I've ripped myself, I could screw up its service for other listeners. Does anyone know what the behavior is?

yason 15y ago

It took me a while to get rid of the thought pattern superimposed by the title, including the words "nerd" and "free", that the article would be of the impractical sides of using free software (such as having to occasionally tweak around miscellaneous problems related to compatibility with proprietary software).

deleted 15y ago

[deleted]

DanBealeC 15y ago

disturbing that so many HN readers install software without knowing what it does, or how it does it. Having sad that, the docs could be a bit more clear. For example, Spotify says quite clearly in sentence ii of para 14 of the end-user-agreement that "(ii) 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. You may adjust the level of usage that the Spotify Service makes of your computer in the settings of the Spotify Software Application."

seattlenerd 15y ago
Considering the first indication of possible P2P functionality in the license agreement is the phrase "and other users," Spotify could be more upfront.

hammock 15y ago

Whoever edited the title of this submission (it used to be "when Spotify wasn’t playing audio, it was using my network connection. A lot.") just took the whole thread out of context. This was never about the blog post, it was about the specific paragraph referencing Spotify and its P2P-ness.

planckscnst 15y ago
The people editing the titles just to match the original source are driving me nuts. I don't care how cute or clever the author was in picking a title. I want to know what the damn thing is about so I can make a good decision whether or not to spend time reading it! A good HN title should efficiently communicate to me why I should click on this link. The original title was interesting. This one is not: the only reason I clicked on it again was because it had a high number of votes and comments.