Is your network being abused by employees using Spotify?

 

Spotify reached a milestone of 20 million monthly active users in May, according to music industry blogger and former
Jupiter Research analyst Mark Mulligan, who has been tracking Spotify usage with the help of Facebook’s publicly available app data.

Mulligan estimated that 17 percent of Spotify’s active users are paying for the service, which would mean that the company has around 3.4 million paying subscribers.   Mulligan estimates that Spotify could gain up to eight million paying subscribers within the next 12 months.

Spotify AB, the service is available in Australia, Austria, Belgium, Denmark, Faroe Islands, Finland, France, Germany, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway,Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, the United Kingdom, and the United States.

The system is currently accessible using Microsoft Windows, Mac OS X, Linux, Telia Digital-tv, iOS, Android, BlackBerry, Windows Mobile, Windows Phone, S60 (Symbian), webOS, Squeezebox, Boxee, Sonos, WD TV, and MeeGo.^{[8][9][10][11][12][13]}

In parallel with this growth, there has been an increase in concern on the impact Spotify traffic is having on organisations networks.  On top of these concerns,  there are those also around the bring your own device (BYOD) culture that is present and growing in the workplace and the use of Spotify on the increasing range of devices available just adds to the pressures on the IT department.

Spotify provides free audio streams at 160 kb/sec and high-quality streams to subscribers at 320 kb/sec. This means that a single user listening to the free service for one hour would download over 70 MB of data, while a user listening to the premium service all day would download over 1 GB.

You can easily check for Spotify activity on your network with NetFort LANGuardian, software that captures and analyses the traffic flowing through your network switch, stores it in a database, and displays the details in a web browser.

Take a look at the video below by Darragh Delaney, head of Technical Services at NetFort, giving you a demo of how LANGuardian is able to detect Spotify on your Network.

If you are not already a LANGuardian user you can still try this on your own network by downloading the 30-day free trial version of the software.

For more information on NetFort LANGuardian and other technology solutions for business and public sector organisations, including where you can purchase from, contact us today

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