Spotify using over 400Mbps of upload and download bandwidth

[JT512]

Plan

Premium

Device

Desktop PC

Operating System

Windows 11

My Question or Issue

Occasionally I've noticed my connection to be stuttering in other programs. I narrowed the issue down to Spotify, shutting it down fixes the problem immediately always. I also noticed that the data usage of Spotify is incredibly high. In less than 3 days windows show the data usage to be 50 GB, the local storage used is ~2 GB.

Why is Spotify stealing my bandwidth and what for?

[Alex]

Hi there @JT512,

Thanks for the post.

This is most likely related to the streaming quality you've set for your Spotify app. If you've set your music and podcast streaming quality to "Very High" the app will need more data to stream the audio and video. 

You can try setting this to "Normal" or "Automatic" to see if that makes a difference. If the app still consumes too much data and try the "low" setting.

Hope this helps.

[JT512]

I do have quality set to very high. I once again reset the data usage after I posted this thread. Since Saturday Spotify has used 38 GB of data. Even if I had it on 24/7 that would be over 1 Mbps (I've listened maybe 12h worth).

And that doesn't explain the upload bandwidth either...

[Susan_GP]

Hi @JT512,

Thanks for your reply. 

The app uses some of your device’s internet bandwidth to play music without buffering. To reduce bandwidth usage you can download music to listen offline or you can also try using the web player.

On another note, we recommend clearing the caché from the app’s settings and then making sure the streaming quality is set to "Normal" or "Automatic". Check if that makes a difference.

Keep us posted!

[senseiRiksha]

Hi everyone,

I am having issue with Spotify windows app (currently using Windows 11, but was happening on Windows 10 aswell).

Suddenly in middle of listening it starts using a lot of network resources (sometimes it goes over 500Mbps). This is clean/fresh Windows 11 installation (though the problem lies in OS, but looks like not) with fresh clean individual app download (not windows store). When this happens, PC freezes for a bit and network usage stays that way, sometimes for a few minutes, sometimes until I relaunch the spotify.

You can find screenshot from today in attachment.

Please help, am I missing something?

Thanks in advance.