About two months ago I got a phone call from a friend. I'm kind of the tech guy in my circles: I got called when something technical is not right. This guy told me that he have reached his data limit (2gb per month) every month while he doesn't do that much browsing on his iPhone. I agreed to come to his house and take a look on his data usage.
When I arrived I looked at the data. It was last resetted about a year ago and he used over 30gb since. I saw that about 12gb was from Spotify. I was not really that suprised, because this guy is a musician and listens to a lot of music. I said to him that he should consider putting playlists offline so his data usage will go down. I thought everything was good until he said that his playlsits were offline already and that he only listens to a few songs he doesn't have offline a month. I looked into the app and saw he was right - almost all his playlists were made available offline.
I became really curious and looked into my own data usage from Spotify. I personally have a 12gb a month plan - so I don't check my data usage and don't really care about it. But I saw a big number too - and I know that I only listen to offline playlists.
I started investigating and came to the conclusion that the data usage is because of album covers. In offline mode, I use no data but I don't have album covers showing up. While in online mode, I can see the album cover being downloaded from the internet when starting a song. I monitored that it caches like 3 album covers when starting a playlist: the first one and the two after that, and it uses around 1,5mb for those 3 covers. It's already to much data, but it becomes even worse if you starting skipping songs. When I did that, I could get between 20-25mb in a minute. That's pretty bad for people who are listening to a playlist searching for a song with their earpods.
I looked up the issue on forums and saw it dated from like a year ago. A lot of people mentioned this issue, but nothing happend.
It seems so ineffiecient to me. I couldn't find the answer on why the app is doing this. Is it to save data space on someone's phone? If my calculations are correct, a cover is taking up around 0,5mb per song. It's not that much if you think a song is between 6-10mb. I think most people rather have the cover stored on their device then using celluar data to get it everytime they play the song. There's almost no caching: if I listen to a song and fetch the cover, 15 minutes (and 4 songs later) it needed to redownload it again. It also seems really bad for the Spotify servers, which already has so much to do.
So my friend started using his playlist in offline mode. He doesn't care that much about album art and I think most users don't. But I believe a lot of people think when they're making a playlist offline, that it doens't use any or really less data. They don't put the app in offline mode - they wanna add a song directly to a playlist when it gets in their mind. Most people don't look at their mobile usage data and don't know Spotify is draining data because of it's covers - but they do go over their data plan with a big thanks from Spotify. And that's a bad thing.
Staff / Moderator/ 3 years ago in Social & Random