Practical Nerd: The hidden price of “free”

Sounds like he is yet to be shocked to discover why Skype is free :)<p>On a more serious note, Adobe Flash Player 10 comes equipped with P2P streaming meshwork, which is <i>enabled by default</i> 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.<p><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Real_Time_Media_Flow_Protocol" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Real_Time_Media_Flow_Protocol</a>

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.

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.<p>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.<p>How often do you actually have Spotify running without listening to music anyway?

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 <i>free</i>.

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.<p>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"<p>Source <a href="http://www.csc.kth.se/~gkreitz/spotify-p2p10/" rel="nofollow">http://www.csc.kth.se/~gkreitz/spotify-p2p10/</a>

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

"No “free” streaming service is worth the risk of pissing off the Xfinity limit police and losing my Internet service."<p>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.<p>a nice insight turned into fear mongering - this is how a lot of bad memes start.

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

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

This doesn't really surprise me to be honest. Spotify also caches <i>a lot</i> 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.

disturbing that so many HN readers install software without knowing what it does, or how it does it.<p>Having sad that, the docs could be a bit more clear.<p>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."

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.

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).

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.

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.

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

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.<p>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.

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.

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

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.

A good reason to try <a href="http://songspin.fm" rel="nofollow">http://songspin.fm</a> - nothing to install, just stream cool music continually in your browser.

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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>(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.)