Hacker News Reader

Comment by sudonim | Hacker News Reader

One of the reasons I canceled my spotify subscription is that I learned I was participating in a p2p network without my knowledge. If I'm paying for it, I don't want to be a node in their network. Most users are probably clueless about that because they aren't up front at all.

View on HN

> If I'm paying for it, I don't want to be a node in their network.

You are paying for music licensing and you get the delivery for free because of the p2p nature of their system. Traditional client-server delivery would've simply translated into higher monthly fees, which I am pretty sure would've not been any more popular among their average user base.

Perhaps, but I agree they should be more up front about the way they use bandwidth.

Rhapsody, Rdio, etc. all do client-server and cost the same.

Seems a minor point to me, the monthly fee is relatively small. For example I would happily pay the same fee if instead of them providing the application they just gave me the right to download anything from their catalog from bittorrent sites.

Your upload bandwidth is more limited than down though (although how much does the average user really use upstream anyway?).

It should be easy to use a firewall to throttle the outbound traffic on whatever port spotify uses. Pherhaps you could just block it altogether , does the service still work even if you are not sharing?

I wonder what the legal implications of this are though, could the RIAA or similar at some point decide to start suing individual spotify users for sharing their music even though the record companies have some agreement with spotify in place?

Why does it matter?

Because most home connections are asymmetrical, and even a small amount of upstream bandwidth usage can degrade the performance of everything else.

I seem to remember reading that the speed is of your connection is tested, and the amount of data sent is customized not to slow your connection down.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com