Spotify was created at the same time than the clouds services like AWS S3. So it was a bit old fashioned servers management and they couldn’t rely on the cloud like we do today.
The competitor Deezer arrived very soon after Spotify but didn’t use peer to peer but a cluster of dedibox servers instead. It was extremely low costs servers with a super slow VIA x86 CPU, one 1TB consumer hard drive, a power supply shared between two servers, and a fair amount of bandwidth. I believe deezer was much easier to implement by using a simpler architecture closer to the modern cloud model (shitty managed VMs on overprovisioned hosts vs shitty managed bare metal).
They both used the flash player to play the music. Deezer was more web and Spotify more flash.
That’s for what I remember.
