If you're on a limited data plan, there are a few tricks you can use to keep your data usage in check. Everything You Can Do to Reduce Your iPhone's Cellular Data Usage Everything You Can Do to Reduce Your iPhone's Cellular Data Usage If you're sick of running out of data or racking up massive bills, it's time to take control of your usage and restrict what your iPhone can do online. Read more . One of the common data-draining culprits is your streaming music app, but with a little trick, you can keep that to a minimum as well.
To ensure your music streaming app uses as little data as possible, you'll need to change the audio bitrate on your music streaming app of choice. If you know you're low on data at the end of the month, you can also set streaming to Wi-Fi only.
If you have a Spotify premium account, you can save playlists for offline listening, but if you don't think it's worth it, is Spotify Premium worth it and should I upgrade? Is Spotify Premium worth it and should you upgrade? Is Spotify Premium worth it? In this article, find out what Premium offers and whether you should upgrade from Spotify Free. Read More Go to Settings (tap the gear icon)> Broadcast quality and select Normal .
Your music will play at a minimum bitrate of around 96 Kbps compared to 160 Kbps on High and 320 Kbps on Extreme.
Open Google Play Music, go to Settings and scroll down to Playback > Quality in the mobile network. and select Low .
Under Playback, you can also turn on the feature to stream music over Wi-Fi only. Also make sure to toggle Cache music while streaming which will also reduce data usage on music you listen to regularly.
Under Downloading , toggle Download on Wi-Fi only . In this way, when you download music for offline listening, you can be sure that you won't lose your data when you do this.
On Amazon Music, you can't adjust the bitrate, but you can increase the size of your music cache to reduce data usage. Go to Settings (tap the gear icon)> Music cache size .
The default size is 500MB. You can increase it to 1,000 mb or unlimited. If you go for the unlimited option, this will obviously take a bit of space on your phone, but Amazon Music will automatically free up 10% of the disk space. Also make sure that Download on Wi-Fi only is on.
Do you find yourself gravitating to YouTube to listen to music? Tap your profile photo to open the menu and go to Settings and make sure Play HD on Wi-Fi only is on.
Apple hasn't given listeners control over playback quality, but you can minimize data usage during downloads. Go to your iPhone Settings and scroll down to Music> Cell phone data .
Make sure download is turned off. This means that your data will not be used when your music library is updating or when album artwork is uploaded.
Pandora also doesn't let you adjust the playback bitrate, but you can turn off higher quality audio. Tap the hamburger menu icon and go to Settings> Advanced and make sure Higher Quality Audio turns off (Pandora defaults to this setting).
Do you have any tips or tricks to save data usage when listening to music on your phone? Let us know in the comments.
