Gone were the days when you needed to keep a huge chunk of music files of your playlist. All thanks to digital music services like Spotify, listening to your favorite songs is just a click of an app. Besides, it also offers a huge library of music and podcast to choose from.
Indeed, Spotify has significantly saved many of us tons of space in our smartphones. However, there’s a small disadvantage — dealing with increased data consumption.
Can we lower the data usage of Spotify?
Considering that the internet in the Philippines is relatively more expensive and slower, we can’t deny that some of us are always wary of how much data we’ve already consumed. So, it’s a great question to ask — how much does Spotify actually use up in terms of data?
The answer depends on what sound quality you chose. But yes, you can actually save up some data allocation if you pick a lower quality music instead of leaving it on automatic. Spotify app allows you to choose between five varying streaming qualities namely:
- Automatic — depends on your network connection
- Very high — 320kbps
- High — 160kbps
- Normal — 96kbps
- Low — 24kbps
If you don’t know it yet, you may check these options in the Settings > Music Quality.
As expected, the higher the quality, the bigger the data consumption. You’ll be surprised that Spotify is actually using lesser data than what you expected. And for sure, it consumes less than streaming music directly from YouTube with a video included, unless you’re subscribed to YouTube Premium.
To have a better glimpse of what’s happening behind the scenes, here’s an overview of the data consumption on each quality and how much data you’ll be using.
A typical song nowadays run for around 3 minutes, so we took that as a basis to see how much data we are going to consume for 1 song, 10 songs, 25 songs, 50 songs, and 100 songs. Just to note, these are all estimated numbers.
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Spotify estimated data consumption of 1 song up to 100 songs
| Data consumption | Low (24kbps) | Normal (96kbps) | High (160kbps) | Very high (320kbps) |
| 1 song | 0.54MB | 2.16MB | 3.6MB | 7.2MB |
| 10 songs | 5.4MB | 21.6MB | 36MB | 72MB |
| 25 songs | 13.5MB | 54MB | 90MB | 180MB |
| 50 songs | 27MB | 108MB | 180MB | 360MB |
| 100 songs | 54MB | 216MB | 360MB | 720MB |
The difference in the data consumption of Low compared to Very high is quite far. So if you really want to save up, Spotify is quite flexible on this matter because of its wide-array of options.
Another important feature is the Spotify caching. This means that if ever you play a song twice, it would no longer need to consume bandwidth for the second time — as long as it’s still within the cache.
Still, compared to video streaming sites, let’s say, YouTube, Spotify is still far in terms of data usage. (Unfortunately, some people still use YouTube to listen to music.)
Data consumption of Spotify compared to YouTube
Given this scenario, watching 720p HD videos in YouTube, you may use up to 2.5GB of data per hour or as much as 4GB if it’s 1080p Full HD. If it’s 480p resolution, you still need more or less 600MB per hour. Clearly, Spotify is a far more efficient way of using your data if you’re just after music.
Just an important reminder, to those using Spotify Premium, you don’t need to worry about data. There is an a download option which allows you to download your songs and playlists so you can listen to them offline. However, for those you are using the basic free Spotify, this is a good consideration to make sure that you’re not wasting your precious internet data allocation.
So, how long do you use Spotify in a day? We hope that this article helped you in using your limited data wisely. If you have questions, let us know in the comments.