topic Re: Massive cache in Desktop (Windows)

Massive cache

jQuirk1 — Tue, 10 Mar 2026 21:00:54 GMT

Plan

Premium

Country

Device

Windows 11 PC

Operating System

Windows 11

My Question or Issue

I was looking at my EQ in settings, scrolled down and saw a cache setting. It said there was >20000MB (over 20GB) of cache in case of "slow network" (I have very, very fast network). I checked in file explorer the storage left before and after I pressed "clear cache" and sure enough I gained 20 whole gigabytes of storage. So what on earth was it doing that for? I had 0 downloads, had just opened the app after booting my computer, so shouldn't have a backlog. It's fine now for me, but that's not a small issue, 20gb is a significant portion of some people's storage.

Screenshots of app setting, before and after storage space are attached.

Re: Massive cache

dinomight — Tue, 10 Mar 2026 21:20:00 GMT

Hey @jQuirk1, welcome to the community, and thanks for your post! It's normal for Spotify to build a cache over time as you're using the app and listening to tracks. These temporary files would still be there even after you've just started up your computer, as they remain from previous listening sessions. This isn't necessarily affected by the current speed of your network, as it's designed more as a backup so that Spotify will continue to work well if there does happen to be a decline in network quality at any point.

I agree that 20GB+ is a very large cache, and this would likely be affected by the number of tracks you've recently listened to as well as your setting for streaming quality, eg, lossless could potentially result in a larger cache than one of the lower quality settings.

Re: Massive cache

PaulMac — Sat, 14 Mar 2026 20:55:01 GMT

This a constant problem for me too on my android meaning I need to clear the cache every few days. Spotify builds up the cache around 10 times faster than the combined total of every other app on my phone. It's simply insane how much space it eats up.

Re: Massive cache

tall1oN — Wed, 22 Apr 2026 17:05:09 GMT

Since i use lossless on my phone i build up like 10-12GB of cache per day, i dont event want to use any cache as i have infinite data-usage on my phone plan and coverage is basically always good enough to stream music. But I guess in 2026 you need a smartphone with 1 TB of storage just to be able to listen to music at all.

@Spotify please add a cache setting to limit the size or something