High CPU usage on desktop client

[fh19320]

Plan

Free

Country

Poland

Device

Skylake Desktop with iGPU

Operating System

Fedora Linux with KDE

My Question or Issue

I am evaluating Spotify Premium to be installed on multiple Linux desktops.

The issue I am facing is quite high CPU usage due to animated bars indicating that the song is playing. If I scroll down so it is not visible, the CPU goes down to 3-5%. Otherwise it oscillates at around 20% single core usage.

Note that this is very high and it's comparable with youtube playing video. Therefore when running in background and working with e.g. browser, it slows down the CPU considerably due to heavy context switching and load on two cores.

I think it would be not difficult to make this animation much slower, with changing it to 2x slower animation, and this would lower cpu usage by 8% on single core and it would be a lot. This could make every spotify fan PC faster, consuming less energy and be environment friendly, in these hard times.

I understand that the image on the UI is like a something special to hundreds of millions of people, and chaning is no easy, but as today Boris Johnson said, going green can be very easy for everyone.

[Connorjordan]

Same issue here

OS: Arch Linux

DE: KDE Plasma (Wayland)
CPU: Ryzen 7 9700X (OC to 5.7GHz)
Spotify installed via: extra/spotify-launcher (also happens with flatpak)

Some songs are absolutely fine and use 1-2% CPU, but others absolutely chug

Example: https://open.spotify.com/track/6LKvzEJQTIm2RrWAMPwQH6?si=08ffe04e527e4a36

Nothing else running, this song alone loads almost 2 full cores.

[v1nsj-3g_xnz8]

Unfortunately, I have a similar issue with my ThinkPad running Fedora 42.

Using the Spotify Web Player in Firefox, I'm at ~6 W with the lowest display brightness setting and ~10 W at the highest display brightness setting when playing a podcast using a Bluetooth headset. Using the client, we're talking about ~10 to ~15 W depending on the display brightness, so the battery life is greatly reduced.

Please fix this.

[b1nd]

The Spotify application seems does not to be optimized well. Better not to listen to music on laptop with no AC connected. With the app on top I have around 20-27% permanent CPU usage with jumps to over 50% on track change.

However with the app minimized CPU usage drops do 1-5%

[judithundstephan]

Same problem here on three devices, ubuntu and fedora, flatpack, snap and native .deb.

[Rediwed1]

I am having the same issue on Linux Mint. Downloaded from the Software Manage / Official Store

[andrefffluis]

So I actually had this excat problem as well! The CPU usage was at 20--30% and after just minimizing the window it immediately dropped to even less than 1% !! After opening the window back up it also peaked to 37 PERCENT !!!  It's wild that I was able to find a solution to my problem in a thread from 4 years ago too.
For reference:
Plan: Free
Device: ASUS laptop
OS: Fedora 42 Linux with KDE