A 3-minute song streamed on Spotify can use 2MB of mobile data. While this may not seem like much, it is Streaming music for an hour can use 40MB. An hour a day for a full month can be 1.2 gigabytes (GB) of mobile data. These little things add up to a lot of mobile data usage when you're constantly on Spotify. In this article, we'll learn how to conserve mobile data while using Spotify.
If you tend to use up almost all of your data usage for the month, or if you're traveling and need to reduce your data usage, this guide is for you.
Download your music
The best way to save mobile data is not to use it at all! Using Spotify Premium You can download up to 10000 songs to each of your five devices. If you don't have Spotify Premium or your phone doesn't have enough storage space for songs, skip to the next part of this guide, where we'll manage your streaming settings.
Before following these steps, make sure you're connected to Wi-Fi. Otherwise, playlists will be downloaded using your mobile data.
Step 1: Open your Spotify app and access the playlist(s) you want to download to your device.
Step 2: On iOS, you can tap the Download button (circled below), which will automatically start downloading the playlist to your device. You can also go to the playlist settings by tapping the ellipsis (…) button and tapping Download.
Adjust your settings
Spotify gives you the freedom to adjust the quality of the songs you stream. Higher-quality songs require more data usage—just as watching a 1080p video requires more data than a 420p video. Music is the same way.
Activate data saving
Step 1: Open the Spotify app and tap the Settings button in the top right corner.
Step 2: In the Settings menu, tap the Data Saver option. Switch to Data Saver, and if you also listen to podcasts, switch to Audio-only Podcasts.
This ensures that when you play music on your phone, the animated album art (which is a video) will be still and will use less mobile data.
Adjust sound quality settings manually
The great part about these settings is that you have more control over when you want to save data and when you are more liberal with your data usage.
Step 1: Access your Spotify settings, scroll down to the Sound Quality option, and tap it.
Step 2: The first set of settings you'll see are WiFi Streaming and Cellular Streaming. You can leave the WiFi settings at High or Very High to maintain the quality of your music.
Set your cellular broadcast settings to low.
Step 3: Scroll down, and now let's move on to the Listening Enhancement setting. Switch to Automatically adjust quality. This will ensure that even when you have poor internet bandwidth, your music will still be able to play.
Step 4: Turn off Download using Cellular (circled above). With this setting turned off, you won't accidentally use data when downloading music. Songs will download as soon as you connect to Wi-Fi.
Operating Settings
Playback settings allow you to adjust how you want your music to sound. You can enable crossfades, which allow your songs to blend seamlessly together. Many of these settings are fun to adjust so you can make your music sound better for you as a whole.
Fortunately, most of these settings don't affect your data usage.
Step 1: Open your settings on Spotify and find the playback setting.
The offline mode switch is great to use if you know you can only use your downloaded music.
Step 2: Scroll down to the bottom of the settings and find the Canvas toggle and turn it off. Again, any visuals displayed are video. Media and content download frequently, and data usage increases over time.
Save data, stream music
If you have a personal collection of audio files, you can conserve mobile data while using Spotify, by: Upload your music library to SpotifyReducing the amount of streaming and the quality of the streams you download will help save data usage in the long run.
