And speaking as a paying customer ($20/mo so my wife and I can each have mobile access), it would be really nice if I could at least choose a limit on the P2P bandwidth so that I wouldn't be forced to close it altogether.
Actually he discusses his reason, right there in the post. Spotify used a lot of his bandwidth with no way to throttle (as others on this thread have discussed), in a way that he didn't feel was disclosed up-front.
It's great that you love Spotify and get value from it, but don't jump on this board calling someone a liar and questioning their integrity because they don't get the same value from it.
But, to the point, he never said how much traffic he was seeing, so in his case /any/ traffic could be deemed "a lot". All services these days use your network connection to some extent, but I'm finding it hard to believe that it actually may end up congesting your networking connection, without seeing some serious proof.
I can to some extent see his point where this should've been clear from the start of, that Spotify will make use of your upstream network connection. Hopefully Spotify will make changes so that at least the US-market get notified that they might end up paying their service provider a premium, just for using Spotify.
Why do you assume that, just because upstream traffic is not high for you, it isn't for anyone else?
I've been running Spotify since early beta, and monitor the network usage of all my application, both when it comes to traffic and when it comes to what it accesses (littlesnitch is a great tool!). Spotify hardly uses any upstream bandwidth, and if it were using a lot, I should've seen that. I see a lot of downstream network usage.
This is just another blogger to piss on Spotify for some strange reason, to the point where they make up stuff. And it does not make sense to enable the user to not have any caching, then the network usage of the entire swarm would've quadrupled. I feel that 1GB minimum and standard at 10% of free diskspace (!!!! free, not total) is a good middle road.
(For those interested, Skype uses a boatload more bandwidth than Spotify. We've had problems with network congestion because so many clients on the network had Skype open and they routed so many calls through our network.)