Spotify is a Sweden-based proprietary music streaming program, which allows listening to specific music without delay via browsing artists, albums or created playlists.

Mode of operation and system requirements
Spotify provides the transfer of soundfiles via internet through the combination of server-based streaming and Peer-to-Peer technology (P2P) involving the listeners themselves (see also: mesh networking). Even with slow internet connections, there are no great delays when playing music. An internet connection of at least 256 kbit/s is recommended, as the bitrate of the stream is up to approximately 160 kbit/s. The sound files can be played on demand, as if they were installed on the hard disk of the user. Songs are cached on the client computer to prevent wasting bandwidth by streaming the same songs over and over. The audio codec used is Vorbis.

The content 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.

The system requirements are at least Mac OS X 10.4, Windows XP or a newer operating system. It is also possible to run the program in Linux using Wine. The cache size can be limited by the user and the memory location of cache can be chosen. At least 1GB of free space is recommended for the cache.

The user must set up an account in order to use the software. This account can be used on several computers, but can only play music at one computer at a time.