One of Spotify Premium‘s selling points is the ability to download your playlists for offline listening. This feature is handy if you’re outdoors and spend significant time without an internet connection.
The only downside of this feature is that it eats into your phone’s storage quota. If you’re working with limited space, you need to know how much storage capacity Spotify downloads will take.
Here’s a guide to help you plan how many songs or podcasts you can download on Spotify for offline listening without depleting your storage capacity.
How much storage will 100 Spotify songs take?
For testing purposes, I created a 100-song playlist, and the table below shows the amount of space it took across different audio quality settings.
I tested both Spotify and Spotify Lite (the Lite version is only available on Android), and here’s a breakdown of the metrics for the 100 songs.
| Quality Setting | Spotify | Spotify Lite |
| Low (Basic) | 85 MB | 74 MB |
| Normal | 284 MB | 283 MB |
| High | 460 MB | 468 MB |
| Very High | 994 MB | 1024 MB |
If you prefer raw data, here are some screenshots from the Android device I used in this test:
This data estimates the number of songs you can download depending on the storage you have at your disposal.
However, the data only considers songs with an average length of 3–5 minutes. What if you listen to lengthy songs like classical music or even podcasts, which are usually hours long?
We’ll take the length of the playlist I used for this test and convert it into time. With this information, we can estimate the amount of storage you’ll need for each hour of Spotify audio content you download.
How much storage will one hour of Spotify audio take?
My 100-song playlist is 6 hours and 45 minutes long. To come up with a definitive number — we have to convert this time into minutes which translates to 405 minutes.
This number will help us know the amount of space each minute of audio takes up across the different audio qualities.
Here are the results converted to the amount of space taken per hour of audio download on Spotify.
| Quality Setting | Spotify | Spotify Lite |
| Low (Basic) | 13 MB | 11 MB |
| Normal | 42 MB | 42 MB |
| High | 68 MB | 69 MB |
| Very High | 147 MB | 152 MB |
From this data set, we can infer that 10 hours’ worth of listening will take up about 1.5 GB of your storage space at the maximum sound quality.
These figures also estimate how much data you’ll need per hour if you prefer streaming and are on a capped mobile data plan.
Take control of Spotify’s storage usage on your device
With the figures from the test results, you can easily plan out your storage quota and enjoy offline Spotify listening without hassle.
You could also lower the quality settings to save on space. The Normal setting sounds quite all right, especially on podcasts.
I recommend clearing Spotify’s app cache to save on space even further because it quickly adds up whenever you’re streaming audio.
