Spotify & Storage: 10 Common Questions (Answered)

Spotify has reigned supreme as most people’s number one platform for music. However, using Spotify on your device will take up storage space and in this article, we take a look at the most common questions around the topic of how Spotify uses your device’s storage.

Everything You Need To Know About Spotify & Storage

Spotify Premium account holders can download up to 10,000 songs per month, however. The amount of storage space a user requires will be dependent on how many files they download, however, it is necessary to have at least 1GB of space on your device for an efficient user experience.

Table of Contents

Does Spotify Stream Or Download The Music?

Spotify allows every user, both free and premium, to stream music online via an internet connection.

Whether you can download music depends on what type of Spotify membership you have.

Unfortunately, only premium members have the ability to locally download playlists, albums, and songs for offline listening- and they can do this across multiple devices (up to a maximum of 5).

Premium members can download up to 10,000 songs monthly on each of the 5 devices, but they will have to connect to the internet at least once a month in order to maintain any offline playlists.

Free members do, however, have the ability to download podcasts for offline listening along with Spotify’s premium members.

Does Spotify Cache Songs When Streaming?

Spotify stores some of your music and podcasts in your device’s cache, so that when you go to play them, the playback is smooth- with no pauses or long buffering times.

Spotify recommends you have at least 1GB of free storage space on your device to ensure you have the best playing experience.

How Much Storage Do Spotify Downloads Take?

There are many benefits to downloading music and podcasts on Spotify compared to streaming online, such as:

No unnecessary data is used.
You can listen to your music from anywhere without worrying about WiFi.

One of the downsides is that by downloading files for playback it will inevitably take up precious storage space on your device.

The amount of storage space that downloads use ultimately comes down to the audio quality and length of the song, album, or podcast that you are downloading.

For example, a 1-minute song is going to use up far less space on your device than an epic 10-minute-long soundtrack.

Songs typically take up 3-10MBs depending on their length or quality.

More numbers about Spotify: Spotify User Demographics and statistics.

Can You Limit How Much Storage Spotify Will Use?

There are 5 ways that Spotify members can limit how much storage the app uses:

Create an offline storage limit – this limits how much information is stored on your device.
Set a storage limit for downloads – Spotify will then stop downloading when this limit is reached.
Change the location where files are stored on their devices.
Adjust the audio quality of the downloads – users can save a huge amount of space on their device by switching to a lower audio quality setting.
Set a limit on the cache size to restrict how much data is downloaded at any one time.

Where Is Spotify Music Stored On Your Phone?

When you download songs from Spotify for offline play the files will be stored on your phone.

Files saved by Spotify to your iPhone will become encrypted and therefore users cannot search and look for specific Spotify files from within their device.
Android devices will have Spotify songs saved either to the internal memory or the SD card.
Using the Spotify app, Android users can, using the ‘Settings’ menu and navigating to ‘Storage‘, check the destination of their saved music.

Where Is Spotify Music Stored On Your Computer?

Saving music for offline play is a great Spotify feature, but when it comes to storage on our computers, we usually like to know where things are.

Although you are able to access the saved files from the Spotify app, finding out exactly where on our hard drive those songs are located is good for peace of mind.

Location Of Saved Spotify Songs On Your PC:

If you want to see where all those Spotify playlists are ending up on your Windows PC then just enter this into file explorer:

“C:\Users\YOUR USER NAME\AppData\Local\Spotify\Storage“
This will bring you to the exact folder where the information is stored.
Alternatively, you can locate the folder through the Spotify app:
1. Launch Spotify and open the Settings menu.
2. Access ‘Advanced Settings’ followed by ‘Offline Songs Storage‘.
3. From here you can ascertain where Spotify is choosing to download your songs to.

Location Of Saved Spotify Songs On Your Mac:

Similar to the PC, you can use the Spotify app to check the location of saved files by accessing the settings menu and finding ‘Offline Songs Storage’.

However, if you’re looking for the folder location in all its pure glory then we’ve got you covered, too:

Locate your downloaded Spotify songs on your Mac with the following:

/Users/”yourusername”/Library/Caches/com.spotify.Client/storage
You’ll find all the music files hidden away in this folder.

How Much Storage Do Spotify Podcasts Use?

Almost everyone these days has a podcast they love. Podcasts get us through the day, help us relax and unwind, and sometimes have us laughing out loud.

It stands to reason therefore that being able to have podcasts saved on our devices without the need to stream them is a bit of a blessing.

However, when it comes to saving podcasts offline on Spotify the first question you’ll want to know is how much space is it going to take up on my device.

Space on our phones can be limited. With all the photos and videos of loved ones, not to mention the other countless apps that get us through the day, it’s important to know how much storage your podcasts will take up.

However, when it comes to podcasts and their size, the main factor will be how long they are in duration.

Podcasts range in duration, but on average you’ll find they’re around 30mins.
The size of a podcast file is dictated by the duration of the show and the quality at which the file is saved.
If you were to download a Podcat of 30mins at Spotify’s normal quality settings it would take up 21MB.
Download that same podcast at the highest settings and it would be 73MB, and at the lowest settings, only 7.5MB.

What Does “Other Apps” Mean In Spotify Storage?

When you access your Spotify storage section you may have noticed a blue bar that indicates ‘other apps’.

This has understandably confused many users because it leads people to conclude that Spotify is storing information in other apps.

This is not the case.

‘Other apps’ means other apps. Spotify is simply showing you how much data the other apps are taking up on your device.

‘Other apps’ shown on Spotify storage allows you to make a comparison to the amount of data being used by other apps and Spotify.
It also gives you an impression of how much free data is left on your device.
This understanding of how much storage ‘other apps’ is using can indicate how much room you have left for more Spotify data.
Spotify gives you the ability to save songs and playlists for offline use. Knowing how much room you have on your device can help you decide if you want more storage to dedicate to Spotify.

Will Uninstalling Spotify Delete Downloaded Songs?

Sometimes we have to uninstall an app. Perhaps it’s not working as it should or maybe you need some space on your device for something important.

However, before you uninstall Spotify it’s important to know what the ramifications will be when you do.

The main issue, other than not having access to your playlists and favorite content, is that everything that you’ve downloaded will be removed from your device.

If you’re someone who has invested a lot of time ensuring that your device has a vast library of albums, playlists, podcasts, etc, saved for offline mode, then this may be a concern.

Downloaded songs allow your device to play Spotify content when not connected to the internet.
Uninstalling the Spotify App will remove all saved songs and content from your device.
However, the playlists and favorite songs will still appear in your online library and once you access Spotify again, either through the web browser or by downloading the app again, you will still see the content.
You can always re-download your playlists and any content at a later date or on another device. Depending on your internet connection it may not take too long.

Does Spotify Offline Use Storage?

Spotify gives users the handy solution of using the app offline. If you’re on holiday abroad without internet, or even stuck in an internet blackspot on your way to work, offline mode will become your savior!

Offline mode allows users to listen to any content that they have downloaded.

When you are offline and want to listen to music, you simply select the playlists, albums, or podcasts that you downloaded and hit play.

However, in order for you to reap the benefits of listening to content offline, you’ll need to have sufficient storage space on your device to do so.

Spotify offline will use storage because you have downloaded files to your device.

It would be impossible to play the songs or titles whilst offline without them being saved and stored on your device.

Thus, Spotify offline does indeed use storage.

However, you can free up space by removing them from ‘downloads’ once you no longer need them. This is especially useful for podcasts you’ve already listened to.

That said, you may want to keep that favorite album downloaded and always at the ready.

Does Spotify Use iCloud Storage?

Music from Spotify is meant to be played and stored via the app. Spotify does not use iCloud for storage space or backing up offline songs.

There has been one case in which this happened by accident due to a glitch, but iCloud does not supplement Spotify’s storage capabilities.

However, if you want to use iCloud to store songs from Spotify you’ll need some 3rd party software to convert your Spotify songs to a format that iCloud can save.

Spotify offline songs are encoded as OGG Vorbis files.
Using software such as Tunelf or wizard can convert them to MP3, WAV, etc.
Once the files are converted they can be played without the need of the Spotify app and furthermore, be stored on iCloud.

Sources

Was this article helpful?

Great!

Click to share...

Did you find wrong information or was something missing?

We would love to hear your thoughts! (PS: We read ALL feedback)