It may be hyped as the saviour of the music business, but Spotify has just earned itself a similar kind of ban in academia that once troubled its less legal forebear Napster.
The venerable Oxford University has blocked the music-streaming application on its network, claiming excessive use of it is eating up too much bandwidth that cannot be justified for educational purposes.
The students were baffled when the service suddenly stopped working last week, according to a report Cherwell, the student paper.
Spotify tells paidContent:UK: “We’re sad to think of our student friends at Oxford University unable to listen to Spotify whilst on campus. We’re talking to the university about how we can help them give the music back to their students.
“It’s important that we offer a high-quality service that gives our users instant – and legal – access to music, but equally we’re working constantly to optimise our technology to ensure everyone can enjoy Spotify.”
It’s not clear how many students at Oxford were actually using Spotify, and for what kind of periods. Spotify has not yet responded to questions of whether it is facing similar bans at other institutions. Spotify tells us it is “not aware of any other institutions having put a stop to Spotify.” The service has close to 7 million users across Europe today.
Spotify works on a peer-to-peer architecture, in which each computer that uses the service acts as a server to move the music around. When something popular and bandwidth hungry, like a media streaming application, uses P2P to work, it can potentially overload the system with traffic. Of course, Spotify’s use of P2P is a world away from Napster, which prompted many universities to ban any service that uses the distribution method.
But not all consumer P2P traffic seems to be equal here. According to the Telegraph, the BBC’s iPlayer and 4oD still work, while Skype and World of Warcraft can apparently “breach its ban on P2P technology.” Good to know that Gordon Ramsay’s Kitchen Nightmares will be helping someone get through their next essay, isn’t it?
Oxford has barred usage of Spotify on its own network, which it lets students use free of charge in halls of residence, libraries and other communal spaces. Students using mobile broadband, or living in private accommodation, can still access Spotify.
“University rules and regulations
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