MacMost Now 803: Spotify Streaming Music Service

Spotify is a competitor to iTunes that streams music to your Mac or iOS device. A free account allows you to listen to music with ads on your Mac, but a premium account lets you download music for offline listening and also use your iOS device to listen. The service is only as good as its catalog of music, and Spotify is far from perfect in that respect.

Comments: 3 Responses to “MacMost Now 803: Spotify Streaming Music Service”

    Danny S.
    12 years ago

    I have started using Spotify recently and am really psyched about it, BUT I do feel that I could easily reach my data cap (10 GB) each month if I didn't monitor how many hours of music I stream with 3G. What do you think? Does the stream "quality" affect the amount of data you use significantly?

    Happy Holidays Gary!

      12 years ago

      Yes. High quality means more bits means more bandwidth. It is a trade-off between quality and bandwidth.
      Depending on your quality, I'd guess it can range from 25MB to 100MB per hour of music. So let's say 75MB per hour. If you listen 4 hours per day, 7 days per week that's about 2GB per month. Of course if you are downloading an album offline with Spotify premium, and listening to it again and again, then bandwidth only counts the first time.
      But if you have an ISP that is limiting your bandwidth, then they should be providing you with tools to measure your bandwidth. So you can check and see how much you are using, exactly.

    Mojo66
    12 years ago

    Thanks Gary for bringing Spotify to our attention. I've taken a look into it and found a few important bits that were missing from your podcast:
    - as a free user, streaming is limited to 2.5 hours/week, 10 hours/month
    - all files are subject to DRM i.e. are encrypted, even offline files that are available to premium users only.
    - while running the Spotify client, a P2P network is active that connects to other clients. This will affect your internet connection.

    HTH.

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