Spotify using 300gb of data a month?! Is that even possible when I listen maybe a couple hours a day at most or is there something nefarious going on?
Spotify using 300gb of data a month?! Is that even possible when I listen maybe a couple hours a day at most or is there something nefarious going on?
26 Comments
There is definately something going on. Spotify downloads a lot of extraneous data that isn’t just the audio stream but I use Spotify for 50-100 hours a month and don’t see usage anywhere near that.
Check if you have it set to download any playlists locally to the computer for offline listening.
So 300GB is 300,000 MB. Streams at perhaps 40 kB/s, so that’s 7.5 million seconds of streaming per month. That’s 2083 hours/month of streaming or about 69 hours/day.
Seems weird. Is it automatically downloading a bunch of podcasts each month or something maybe?
Edit: I should have also specified 300GB is also 300,000,000 kB, apologies. That’s how you get 7.5 million seconds.
Edit2: K to k for kB/s. And to be clear audio is like 320kbps on pc perhaps, so that’s 40 kB/s since 8 kbps = 1 kB/s
Make sure to set downloads to WiFi only
Because lots of stuff will download, daily. This lets you listen to 40 hours of fresh music mixes a day. Check what you got by going to “offline mode” and seeing what’s downloaded. There are settings for all this
Definitely strange. I can see that’s the windows store version of the app. Might be a bug maybe, switch to the one from the web instead and see if it behaves any better.
Is it also playing videos from the songs?
spotify is listening to *you* 👀
Eh wouldn’t trust windows, check on your isp website and see how much your using a month, had windows saying I was using 2TB which was not true
I listen to Spotify on my phone A LOT. I’m talking podcasts and music for the bulk of my 8 hour shift, and during my commute in and out of the office and I’m only at 65 gb for the month.
If your account is set up to automatically download any song you like or add to a specific playlist for offline listening, this is possible when combined with streaming, and data downloading of album art, lyrics, and general app usage.
Does Spotify on PC also play the music video stuff on PC like it does on mobile if it’s open?
A lot of music bro!
If you have some playlists saved they’ll automatically download them when they get updated daily.
4k video podcasts of joe roga
Do you follow any podcasts and is it downloading them automatically maybe?
My steam updates be like:
I use iHeart Radio on my phone connected to Bluetooth in my work van. I drive an average of 4 hours a day and have it streaming the whole time. I average about 1.5 GB a month. The stream quality isn’t as good, but it also isn’t bad, especially in a work van.
Did you download music for offline listening?
Spotify loads lyrics, ads, and sometimes videos that go along with the music. I think that 300GB is still insane, but it’s not impossible
At my last job I used to listen to podcasts/music 7-8hrs a day and it was never that much, not even close
Note this tracks local usage too – do you use the remote play feature at all? It could be sending higher quality audio over the network locally, but it’s not actually downloaded from the internet.
mine after 1 day
Bytes sent: 3Gb
3,281,363,703
Bytes received: 72Gb
72,499,439,438
Link speed: 100 (Mbps)
You are sure this is monthly data, and not total data?
switching to youtube music was the best thing i ever did. i recommend it especially if you use regular youtube and find new music it will show up in your youtube music liked list
As far as I know, on Windows, Spotify runs an install at almost every startup – autoupdate.
I don’t understand people who pay for spotify or youtube premium. Don’t know if op pays for spotify or not, but music on youtube is free, and you have a playlist+ad blocker/sponsor blocker+force play (because youtube decided to pause any video after awhile if you aten’t on the tab), it’s fantastic not adding to the ever growing list of stupid subscriptions
Doing the math, even if you listened for 4 hours a day, 5 days a week (so 80 listening hours a month), that would be just over 8 Mbps streams. Even if it’s playing videos in the background, I find it hard to believe that Spotify would be fine expending that much bandwidth (because of their scale) for something people may not even be noticing.
For context, YouTube recommends 8 Mbps for 1920×1080 at 30 FPS.
If it’s not the downloading of playlists like others have mentioned, I wonder if Spotify does some aggressive caching on desktop..