How Much Data Does Spotify Use Per Month? The Answer's Complicated

When you're always on Wi-Fi, it's easy to overlook just how much data apps like Spotify use per month. But this becomes an issue when you have limited cellular data. Maybe you only have a 5GB monthly cap on your mobile plan and want to conserve it. Or perhaps you're abroad and are relying on local prepaid SIMs to access the internet. In such instances, it's important to know, or at least get an estimate of, the amount of data Spotify uses. This way, you can limit how long you're streaming music or listening to audiobooks on Spotify.

Unfortunately, this isn't one of the Spotify features yet – the app itself doesn't exactly tell you how much data you've already used in the past month. Don't worry, though, you can tell how much data Spotify has used from your phone's system settings and take action to reduce the app's data consumption.

Both iOS and Android provide breakdowns of app data usage, and you can access it through your device settings.

1. On iOS:
   1. Launch the Settings app. 
   2. Navigate to Cellular. 
   3. Tap Show All under Cellular Data. 
   4. Scroll through the apps to see how much cellular data Spotify uses. 
2. On Android:
   1. Go to your Settings app. 
   2. Search for "data usage." 
   3. Select App data usage, Mobile data usage, or Wi-Fi data usage from the results. Mobile data usage will show you how much Spotify consumes when you're using your cellular data. Similarly, the Wi-Fi data usage will tell you Spotify's consumption on Wi-Fi. 
   4. Tap on the date at the top to choose the period you want to check. This might only show you the last six months.

If you want to know how much data a listening session is going to use, it's fairly easy to estimate, but you have to first understand how audio streaming quality (presented in bitrate) affects your data consumption. Spotify's music quality, at least for the desktop and mobile apps, comes in Low, Normal, High, and Very High (available only if you get Spotify Premium). Low quality streams at a bitrate of 24 kbps, Normal at 96 kbps, High at 160kbps, and Very High at 320 kbps.

This bitrate is the amount of data such audio quality uses every second. So if you're playing a song at High quality, that means you're using 160 kilobits of data per second. For a clearer picture of the data usage, you can look at it in terms of per minute and per hour:

• Low (24 kbps): 180 kB per minute and 10.8 MB per hour
• Normal (96 kbps): 720kB per minute and 43.2 MB per hour
• High (160 kbps): 1.2MB per minute and 72 MB per hour
• Very High (320 kbps): 2.4MB per minute and 144 MB per hour

If you stream Spotify at Normal quality for 50 hours a month, you'll consume roughly 2.16 GB of data. 

If you're concerned about the amount of data Spotify uses per month and want to reduce it, there are a couple of Spotify features you could use. For one, try enabling Data Saver. This does two things: lower the audio quality and minimize the appearance of photos while streaming. Follow these steps to adjust your Spotify settings on Android and iOS and activate Data Saver:

1. In the app, go to your profile picture in the top-left corner.
2. Open Settings and Privacy.
3. Select Data-saving and Offline from the menu.
4. Toggle on Data Saver.
5. Turn on "Audio-only streaming for video podcasts" to play only the audio from video podcasts.

You can manually select a lower audio quality from Spotify's settings too. To do so, head over to your profile icon > Settings and privacy > Media quality. Set both Wi-Fi and cellular streaming quality to Low for the lowest data consumption. If you don't want to leave Spotify continuously playing and eating up data after your songs ends, disable Autoplay (for Android)/Autoplay similar content (for iOS). You can find it in Settings and privacy > Playback.