Gone are the days when you used to burn CDs or transfer your favorite songs to your Walkman and iPod. Spotify the music world and the practice of listening to music. Now you can blast your favorite tunes anywhere and everywhere, that could be in a desert or on a road trip, provided you have internet access on your smartphone. Not just internet access, you need to have hi-speed internet. But, the data limits pose a problem. Streaming music like videos eats up a lot of data, so naturally, you are worried every time when you open the Spotify PremiumApk and hit play. Some mobile carriers offer unlimited plans, but you know better. Those unlimited data plans are not exactly unlimited, are they? They have data caps after you exhaust a certain amount of data, the data speed will be reduced.

Data Usage Depends On Music Quality

While you are listening to Coldplay's, 'Hymn for the weekend' on Spotify, it is slowly eating away your data and exhausting all the data before the expiration of the data plan is something you would not even wish it on your worst enemy. It may be good for you know that the amount of data Spotify uses depends entirely on the music quality. You can choose from three music qualities – Normal, High and Extreme and there is also another option AUTO, which automatically sets the audio quality according to your data speed.

At NORMAL level music is streamed at 96kbps, at HIGH level music is streamed at 160kbps and at EXTREME level music is streamed at 320kbps. Only Spotify Premium members can listen to music at the Extreme level.If your sound quality is set at the Normal level, an average 3-minute song will consume 2MB data. At the High level, 3.5MB data will be consumed, and at the highest most level 7.5MB will be consumed.

If you use Spotify to listen to music for 30 minutes a day on an average in a month, you will be using 0.5MB of data if the audio quality is Normal and when the sound quality is Extreme, you will be using 2.2GB of data on the whole. Assuming that you listen to 1 hour of music on average per day in a month, you may need to upgrade your data plan since the data consumed will be much more. At Normal, the data consumed will be 1.2GB, and at Extreme the data consumed will be 4.5 GB. It goes without saying that the longer you stream music, the more data will be exhausted. Spotify learns your music taste and keeps track of the playlists and the songs you frequently listen to. So it ensures the next time you play that song it does not use up much data, but this sure increases your cache.

To change your audio qualities go to setting, then to music quality and then scroll down to streaming. Here you can choose the sound quality from the drop-down list.

Say No To Streaming And Listen To Music Offline

Who listens to music offline when you have such music streaming giants like Youtube and Spotify? Downloading and listening to music is a better option than streaming and constantly checking the data usage. If your internet connection is not stable, then it is all the more reason to download the tunes and listen to them offline. Imagine listening to Imagine Dragons' 'Believer', and it starts buffering just when the beat was to drop, and the chorus was to begin. Oh, the horror! The only downside to downloading is that it uses up disc space.

Spotify has the option for its users to download the tunes, but it is restricted to only three devices for one account and 3333 songs for a single device. Only the Premium members are allowed to use this feature. If you want to download songs from Spotify, you need to upgrade your plan. Spotify offers a premium membership at 9.99 dollars for individual accounts and a family plan at 14.99 dollars. The song limit is not decided by Spotify, but the record labels.

Here is how Spotify music can be downloaded

• Find and open the Spotify app on your phone.
• Search the playlist or the song or the artist you wish to download.
• After you have found the desired song, under the cover art, you will notice the download button. Slide the bar to the right to turn the download on.
• After the song has been downloaded, there will be a green circle beside the song indicating that the song is available offline now.

There is another thing which you must keep in mind. According to the terms and conditions of Spotify, you are required to have some online activity on your Spotify account once a month. Failure to do this will make the offline songs unplayable.

Is There A Way To Manage Your Data Usage?

There is yet another way you can manage or rather keep track of the amount of data that is being consumed by Spotify. This feature is inbuilt in your phone. All you need to do is go to Settings on your phone, navigate your two Mobile Data and there you will be able to see the total amount of data being eaten up by Spotify.

Certain phones come with this feature whereby the user can set the data limit in the data usage section. It keeps track of the amount of data that is being used by all the apps and alerts you whenever you go overboard. This not also helps keep track of your data but also takes the pressure off your head.

You can always listen to music on Wi-Fi, but in cases when you are not at home or at some place where there is no Wi-Fi, you can carry a portable Wi-Fi with you. In that way not only do you have a faster internet connection but also a stable one and you can stream music as long as you want without worrying about data caps.