How much data does Spotify use? The answer depends on your streaming quality and maybe your carrier incentives. Here’s a quick breakdown.
Spotify uses less data than equivalent times of video streaming, but you could rack up more data usage than you expect. That’s especially true if you’re streaming higher-quality audio tracks and podcasts. Spotify offers five different sound quality settings in the app that govern how much data Spotify uses. Let’s take a peek at how to change these settings to reduce data usage.
Spotify Sound Quality Settings
You can change your Spotify sound quality settings by navigating to the Spotify app ‘Settings‘ and scrolling down to ‘Music Quality.’ There are five different settings to choose from, including:
- Low (24kbps)
- Normal (96kbps)
- High (160kbps)
- Very High (320kbps)
- Automatic
The automatic option will choose a sound quality option based on your network connection. You can download high-quality music to your device to avoid massive data charges.
How Much Data Does Spotify Use?
How much data the Spotify app uses depends on what you’re streaming. If you’re a Spotify Premium user, you can download playlists, podcasts, and albums for offline listening to use less data. Otherwise, you can limit Spotify quality tiers to change how much data the app uses when downloading music. Let’s take a peek at Spotify data usage.
Depending on your quality tier, the Spotify app uses anywhere from 0.5 MB up to 8 MB for a song. A full hour of streaming music can use upwards of 150 MB of data. That means a single hour of streaming per day can add up to over 6 GB of data usage just for streaming music.
Low (24kbps)
- Per Minute: 0.18 MB
- Per Hour: 10.8 MB
- Streaming Hours to Reach 1 GB: 92.5 hours
Normal (96kbps)
- Per Minute: 0.72 MB
- Per Hour: 43.2 MB
- Streaming Hours to Reach 1 GB: 23.1 hours
High (160kbps)
- Per Minute: 1.2 MB
- Per Hour: 72 MB
- Streaming Hours to Reach 1 GB: 13.8 hours
Very High (320kbps) – Spotify Premium Only
- Per Minute: 2.4 MB
- Per Hour: 144 MB
- Streaming Hours to Reach 1 GB: 6.9 hours
Remember: You can avoid Spotify consuming your mobile data each month by downloading your favorite playlists, albums, and podcasts to your device before leaving the house if you’re a Spotify Premium member. Stop using up all of your data listening to music and podcasts by pre-downloading them before you leave your WiFi connection.
Depending on your carrier, you may have some basic music streaming ability included.
Carrier Incentives May Include Spotify Streaming
Some North American phone carriers like T-Mobile don’t count music streaming data against your data plan. T-Mobile calls this its Music Freedom benefit, which lets customers “stream all the music they want from participating streaming services without using data.”
This plan includes several music providers like Spotify, Apple Music, Amazon Music, Tidal, YouTube Music, Slacker, SiriusXM, and many more. T-Mobile’s Music Freedom perk is enabled automatically on eligible plans. Just remember that non-music streaming data still counts against you.
Most music streaming services include small amounts of non-music streaming data, like album artwork. The amount of data those non-music files consume varies by streaming partner and the device being used.
How to Make Spotify Use Less Data
Are you running up against your monthly data allotment because you’re streaming Spotify? There are a few steps you can take to reduce your music streaming data usage. Here’s a quick overview of those options.
Download Your Music
Spotify Premium offers users up to 10,000 songs for listening while away from WiFi. You can even turn on an offline mode so Spotify can only play tracks, albums, and playlists you’ve previously downloaded to your device. Spotify Premium costs $10.99/month for a single person, $14.99/month for the Duo plan, and $16.99/month for the Family Plan.
Turn on Spotify’s Data Saver Option
Don’t want to subscribe to Spotify Premium? You can enable the ‘Data Saver’ option in Spotify to keep audio streams at 24kbps and disable the Spotify Canvas feature. Spotify says its data saver feature can reduce Spotify data use by up to 85%. Here’s how to turn on the Spotify data saver feature:
- Tap on the ‘Settings’ icon in your Spotify app.
- Scroll to ‘Data Saver’ and choose a lower quality audio option.
- Uncheck ‘Autoplay’ to turn off Spotify choosing new songs after a playlist is over.
Lets be clear, 320kbps is in no way ‘high quality’ if you can stream any movie on your device then all your music should be streamed in full HD. Spotify is living in its own bubble.