How Spotify Works

I found this interesting article about Spotify.

• User clicks a track to listen to.
• If it’s in the cache, Spotify just starts playing it from there.
• Otherwise, the Spotify client requests the first 15 seconds of the track from the Spotify servers so that playback can start as soon as possible.
• At the same time, the client starts looking for the track on the peer-to-peer network.
• The rest of the track is streamed, from a combination of multiple sources if available (cache, multiple peers, Spotify servers). The more popular a track is, the more likely it will be streamed using the p2p network instead of the Spotify servers.
• When the track has 30 seconds to go, the Spotify client begins searching the p2p network for the next track.
• When the track has 10 seconds to go, if it hasn’t found the next track on the network yet, the client starts pre-fetching it from the Spotify servers.

More information can be found here.

Want to start using Spotify click here.