Music Streaming Data Usage
Calculate how much data Spotify, Apple Music and other music services use.
Results
Music streaming services like Spotify, Apple Music and Tidal use surprisingly different amounts of data depending on quality settings. Streaming at normal quality uses about 1 MB per minute while lossless audio can use over double that. This calculator helps you estimate your monthly music data usage across different quality levels.
Explore all our streaming usage calculator tools, or browse the full cooking hub.
Frequently asked questions
At normal quality (160 kbps), Spotify uses about 60 MB per hour. At the highest quality (320 kbps) it uses about 120 MB per hour. Low quality uses around 30 MB per hour.
Listening 3 hours a day at normal quality for 30 days uses about 5.3 GB. At high quality (320 kbps) that doubles to roughly 10.5 GB. Most data plans can handle this easily.
At similar bitrates they use comparable data. Apple Music's lossless (ALAC) streams can use significantly more - up to 2.4 MB per minute for standard lossless - while Spotify's highest setting is 320 kbps (about 2 MB per minute).
Set your streaming app to low quality when on mobile data. Spotify's low setting (96 kbps) uses just 0.5 MB per minute - four times less than high quality. You can also download playlists on Wi-Fi for offline listening.
A 6-hour road trip at normal quality uses about 360 MB (roughly 0.35 GB). At high quality it uses about 720 MB. Download a playlist before leaving to avoid using any mobile data.