What is the data usage on Spotify?

Music and podcasts can also gnaw at your mobile data volume. How high the data consumption of Spotify is and what you can do to reduce it, you can find out here on GIGA.

Even if audio streams use far less data than videos, daily enjoyment of music can quickly reduce your data volume. For this reason, we recommend that you save frequently heard playlists and albums from Spotify on your smartphone. But you can also adjust the audio quality to save data volume. This is especially recommended if you listen to podcasts and audio books on the go, where the sound quality is usually of secondary importance.

How you can get even more out of Spotify, we show you here in the video:

What is the data usage on Spotify?

Depending on how the sound quality is set for streaming via mobile data, different amounts of data are used. By default, the quality on Spotify is set to “Automatic”, which makes the sound quality dependent on your network connection. The exception is podcasts, which are always streamed at the normal setting of around 96 kilobits per second (kbit / s) even at higher settings.

We have summarized the approximate consumption at the different quality levels for a song or an hour of music enjoyment here in the table:

So if you listen to an hour of music on Spotify every day with the “Normal” setting, you should expect a consumption of approximately 1.3 gigabytes in a month. If you increase the audio quality, the data consumption increases. In addition, the mobile data volume at Spotify is used by advertising and the insertion of covers, lyrics and the like.

How can you reduce Spotify data consumption and save data volume?

To reduce the data consumption of Spotify, downloading your favorite songs is the best method. In the app’s settings, there are other options for reducing data consumption. Just go to it “Begin” (House symbol) and tap on the Gear icon. Here you will find the following settings:

Data saver

Under the menu item “Data Saver” you will find two settings that reduce data consumption. Once the “Data Saver” himself who directly sets the music quality to “low” and deactivates the artist canvases and “Podcast audio only”, which means that only the sound is streamed for video podcasts.

Offine mode

If you start the “offline mode” under the menu item “playback”, Spotify should no longer use any mobile data at all – But you can’t stream anything anymore. In offline mode you only have access to your downloaded music, podcasts and audio books.

Autoplay & Canvas

You can also find the points under “Playback” “Autoplay” and “Canvas”. When AutoPlay is activated, Spotify automatically plays similar tracks as soon as all songs on an album or playlist have been played. The songs can also be selected from songs that have not been saved for offline playback on the smartphone or tablet and thus consume data volume again. Canvas is additional image material that is displayed when playing songs or on the artist’s page – this is of course also downloaded beforehand and thus consumes data volume if the setting is activated.

Sound quality

By default, the sound quality is set to “Automatic” and depends on your network connection. If you want to save data volume, you should set this to “Normal” or even “Low”. More information can be found here: Spotify quality – sound quality and settings of the music streaming service.

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