Sendo um aplicativo P2P, ele usará o tráfego de rede quando:
- Você está solicitando dados de colegas
- Pares estão solicitando dados de você
por isso, mesmo que não esteja a ouvir, pode enviar para outros utilizadores.
Para citar o artigo do Spotify wiki :
The contents of each client's cache is summarized in an index which is sent to the Spotify stream hub upon connecting to the service. This index is then used to inform other clients about additional peers they can connect to for fetching streamed data for individual tracks being played. This is accommodated by each client, upon startup, acting as a server listening for incoming connections from other Spotify users, as well as intuitively connecting to other users to exchange cached data as appropriate. There are currently no official details from the developers about how many connections and how much of a user's upstream bandwidth the Spotify client will use when streaming to other users; the Spotify client offers no way for the user to configure this, but this may change in the future. Audio streams are in the Vorbis format at q5 (approx ~160 kbit/s), or optional q9 (approx ~320kbit/s) for premium subscribers, the highest streaming rate for any online service.