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Spotify has around 20 million songs [1], so around 20% of songs are never played.

Two random questions:

- How much is Spotify paying to host those unplayed songs?

- How many of songs have a small number of plays? (< 5 plays, for example)?

[1] http://press.spotify.com/us/information/

Storage is cheap with digital music. Even assuming 10 MB/song, you're looking at 40TB, less than $4k/mo on S3. It's not trivial, but it's probably a drop in the bucket compared to their other costs. Realistically the file sizes are much less than 10MB.

They have multiple encodes in various qualities for each title too, though.

Do they produce these from the source audio before they're listened to though?

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