Spotify is one of the most popular ways to listen to music. An endless supply of music is impressive for audiophiles and anyone who likes to be able to listen to whatever they want at any given time, but it can also be quite data consuming. That's why it's important for listeners to know exactly how much their playlists can cost them in data.
How much data consumes a typical Spotify song
If the user has Spotify in its default setting, a 3 minute song consumes 2 megabytes (MB) of data or more . That means, if you listen to songs for an hour at a time, you will consume about 40MB. At 10 hours of use, Spotify will have consumed about half a gigabyte.
This makes it essential for the user to have a data plan that can meet their needs . There are still some cell phone plans on the market that provide as little as 500MB of data per month, which would only be enough for a few hours of music.
Now there are different quality settings in Spotify, and the amount of data used depends on the quality of the song. You can see the quality of your Spotify music by clicking on " Settings " and then on " Streaming ."
Normal quality is available, transmitting songs at about 96 kilobits per second. High quality is transmitted at about 160 kbps and extreme quality at about 302 kbps. By default, Spotify is set to automatic quality, where it sets a quality based on the user's connection. Automatic quality is always at least 96 kbps.
Normal quality makes a 3 minute song use 2MB of data. In high quality, it will use 3.5 MB, and in extreme quality, it will use 7.5 MB . However, these numbers decrease when playing songs that the user has listened to before, because Spotify caches those songs.
What is the typical monthly data consumption with Spotify
If the listener uses Spotify for 30 minutes a day, it will consume 0.5 GB per month on its normal quality setting and 2.2 GB on its extreme quality setting. One hour of listening a day will use 1.2 GB in normal quality and 4.5 GB in extreme quality. Two hours per day will use 2.4 GB for normal quality and 9 GB for extreme quality.
What about offline playlists
Although the free and premium versions of Spotify use the same amount of data, Spotify Premium also allows the user to download up to 3,333 songs . That's a limit per device, and you can do it with up to three devices. After downloading the songs, no internet connection or data consumption is required to play them.
How can I use less data with Spotify
Keeping data usage on Spotify to a minimum is easy thanks to its quality settings . The user only has to set the music quality to normal.
The user can also choose to download music only through Wi-Fi networks, deactivating the download option through mobile. This option is available in the same area as the music quality controls.
There is another option to set the rendering quality to the minimum and Disable Canvas .
This is everything you need to know about Spotify data consumption, we hope it will be very useful to save data. Remember that you can share the post on social networks so that it can help more users.