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Depending on your streaming quality and content Spotify can use a fair bit of mobile data, here’s some settings to check to avoid you going over your allotted amount.

When you listen to Spotify on your mobile device without a wifi connection it will use your mobile data, some contracts will only have a limited amount. Although streaming music via Spotify doesn’t use as much as video streaming it can still rack up usage, especially you have it set at the highest quality, not to mention podcasts. Spotify offers five different sound quality settings in the app which will either lower or raise how much data it consumes.

You can access these options by going to ‘Settings’ and scrolling to ‘Music Quality’, here you will find five different options that include: 

  • Low (24kbps) 
  • Normal (96kbps)
  • High (160kbps)
  • Very High (320kbps)
  • Automatic 

Automatic will choose a sound quality option based on your network connection, which can be risky if you have limited data. However, it is important to remember that you can download your music to listen to in offline mode if you have Spotify Premium. 

How much data does Spotify use? 

So, depending on the quality of the stream the app can use anything between 0.5 MB to 8 MB for a song. A full hour of streaming music can use upwards of 150 MB of data, meaning that a single hour of streaming per day can add up to over 6 GB of data usage. Which if you have unlimited is not an issue, but those without less so. 

Low (24kbps) – 0.18 MB per minute 

Normal (96kbps) – 0.72 MB per minute 

High (160kbps) 1.2 MB per minute 

Very High (320kbps) (Premium only) – 2.4 MB per minute 

If you are on a limited data plan with your mobile phone contract then you can avoid going over by downloading your music on your wifi before going out to listen in offline mode (premium subscription only). Or you can turn on Spotify’s ‘Data Saver’ option which keeps audio streams at 24kbps and disables Spotify’s canvas feature. According to Spotify, this option can reduce Spotify data use by up to 85%.