The way we consume music has changed radically in recent years. Streaming platforms are increasingly eclipsing the CD market, while sales of vinyl and cassettes continue to increase.
Among all companies streaming music, Spotify stands out against the competition by achieving the 60 million paid subscriptions in August. Today we are going to analyze how much data is consumed when using this service.
In addition to listening to music on the desktop version, most of us use mobile data to listen to any disc that comes to mind. If you have a reduced data rate, it is probably a good idea to review the consumption and the different options.
Obviously, the data consumption will depend on the quality you have chosen in the settings within the application. Below we can see a list that shows how much is spent with each modality:
- Normal Quality : 96 Kbps. – which translates to 40MB per hour
- High Quality : 160 Kbps. – 70MB per hour
- Extreme Quality : – 302 Kbps. – 150MB megabytes per hour
- Automatic Quality : will determine the quality appropriate to your connection
That means that if you have (for example) a 2GB monthly plan , you could listen to 13 hours at extreme quality, 28 hours at high quality and 50 hours at normal quality. Anyway, we must not forget that Spotify caches many of the songs we have heard, something that will allow us to save a good amount of data.
How to control the consumption of Spotify data
To start, we can go to the system settings to know how much data each application consumes. In my case, I have spent more than 320MB in the last 19 days, having selected the automatic quality.
If we have a somewhat reduced data rate and we see a high data consumption, we may be interested in changing the quality of the music when streaming. We can find the option within the Spotify settings.
Obviously, the best way to save data is to download the music we want while we are connected to a Wi-Fi network. Anyway, we must know that this option is only available to Premium users. You also have to be especially careful to have the option that allows downloading music with mobile data disabled.