Measurements on the spotify peer-assisted music-on-demand streaming system

Spotify is a streaming service offering low-latency access to a large library of music. Streaming is performed by a combination of client-server access and a peer-to-peer protocol. The service currently has a user base of over 10 million and is available in seven European countries. We provide a background on the Spotify protocol with emphasis on the formation of the peer-to-peer overlay. Using measurement data collected over a week by instrumenting Spotify clients, we analyze general network properties such as the correspondence between individual user accounts and the number of IP addresses they connect from and the prevalence of Network Address Translation devices (NATs). We also discuss the performance of one of the two peer discovery mechanisms used by Spotify.