Spotify uses TCP as the transport protocol instead of UDP, since it can take advantage of TCP’s congestion controls and ability to re-send lost packets.Server-side trackers and network queries are used to locate other users who have the music you’re listening to.The client uploads to at most 4 peers at a time.The maximum number of peers in the network is 60, with a soft-limit of 50 peers.There’s no “preferred” peers or supernodes, but a future improvement might be to use peer-to-peer overlays to exploit the overlap in interests between users.It uses a proprietary protocol designed especially for streaming music.

Spotify’s p2p network works like a BitTorrent network to locate peers (other users who have the song you want to listen to).

60% of all music content available was accessed at least once.

79% of server requests were for the most popular 21% of all tracks on Spotify.

88% of track accesses were for the most popular 12% of all tracks on Spotify.

When it does, it’s most likely due to local CPU issues.ĭuring a week-long analysis of all music played via Spotify:

Less than 1% of all playbacks stutter.

Without pre-fetching, it has been measured at 390 ms.

The median playback latency is a mere 265 ms (including cached tracks).

the user jumps about from track to track.

About 39% of playback in Spotify is “random access” i.e.

This helps Spotify pre-fetch the upcoming music so that the next track can start playing instantly.

Most playbacks (61%) are listened to in a predictable order (the user just listens to an album from the first track onwards).

The exception here is Spotify on smartphones, which gets all the music directly from the Spotify servers. The rest comes from the peer-to-peer network (35.8%) or your local cache (55.4%).

Only 8.8% of music playback comes from Spotify’s servers.

Instead, it uses a peer-to-peer network (p2p) that can scale up to meet the demands of millions of users.

Spotify is the only on-demand music streaming service that’s not web-based.It’s a pretty dense technical read, but there are some fascinating stats to be gleaned amongst the computer science. It’s been described in an academic paper by Spotify techno-wizards Gunnar Kreitz and Fredrik Niemelä, who included some very interesting statistics and analysis of their measurements taken during one week in the early part of 2010. Spotify uses some particularly clever streaming technology to deliver all that instant music. CAUTION – THIS PAGE IS PROBABLY NOW OUT-OF-DATE

What is spotify and how does it work