Another Spotify tip.

Music Incidentally, just as an aside, if you have a limited monthly data allowance (eg, mobile broadband) and want to stop Spotify's peer-to-peer upload in its tracks, or at the very least limit it to an irrelevance, after you've opened the applications, delete it from the list of exceptions on your Firewall software. To wit in Windows XP (I'm old(ish) school):

(1) Click Start > Control Panel

(2) Open Windows Firewall

(3) Click the exceptions tab

(4) Highlight Spotify on the list

(5) Click the delete button

(6) When the options window pops up, click yes.

And there we have it, or at least I do. The mechanics of this might be different for each set-up and it may not work for you. Curiously this does only effect uploads. Usefully for a streaming service, downloads are unaffected. This also neatly means that if you're a premium customer using playlist music already downloaded it's almost like listening off-line mode.

Note: You do have to remember to do this each time you start Spotify - it perniciously re-engages itself on every occasion. If you want to save yourself the rigmarole of following the above steps each time you can drag the Firewall icon from Control Panel to the quick launch bar or start menu and it'll create a short cut.

In case you're concerned that knocking out some of the peer-to-peer functionality against Spotify's terms of use, perhaps hidden deep within the small print in that box we all click through and don't read, this was suggest to me by Spotify itself via twitter after I registered by frustration at watching my allowance quickly disappearing whenever I used the service.

That was just before Christmas. Sorry I've not reported back sooner but like chilli chocolate and the narrative structure of the film Adaptation, it required much study before I was convinced that it worked even because I wasn't quite sure why. I still can't get my cranium around probiotic yoghurt.

I should probably add that if you've got an unlimited account it would be pointless and wrong to do all of this since the network would probably keel over and then none of us would be able to listen to the Polyphonic Spree Babies Where The Wild Things Are soundtrack again. Insert emoticon for sadness here.