How much data does amazon music use

Amazon Music, a music streaming platform with over 50 million songs brings music to your phone or computer. It’s Amazon’s leeway to the music world and is available on Android, iOS, and Windows PC.

As a music enthusiast, you get to tune in and listen to your favorite artists and songs over the internet. However, since most users listen to music on their phones and are usually mobile, a question they tend to pose is how much data does the application use? Most phone data plans are limited meaning that you have to be conscious about your data usage even when enjoying your music as you walk.

Amazon Music uses between 175MB and 1.2GB per hour when streaming music. These numbers are estimated based on the audio quality that you choose. Amazon Music offers multiple audio quality ranges from 48Kbps to 320Kbps which is the highest and consumes more data.

Difference between Amazon Music and Amazon Music Unlimited

Amazon offers music in two different tiers – Amazon Music and Amazon Music Unlimited. Both products have the same features including offline music, ad-free among others. However, the main difference lies in the number of songs offered per product. Amazon Music has only 2 million songs while Amazon Music Unlimited has over 50 million songs.

How to reduce data consumption on Amazon Music

Amazon Music draining your cellular data can be painful especially when you find out later that you could save data without compromising the audio quality a lot.

Adjust the streaming audio quality

Amazon Music doesn’t show you the specific bitrate that you’re streaming music on. You can however check it by going to the Amazon Music homepage and then tap on the Browse tab at the bottom of the app screen. Once on the page, navigate to the top-right hand side and click on the three vertical dots to open more options. A window will pop up with a list of options. Select ‘Settings’ from the list and on the settings page, scroll down to the ‘Streaming Audio Quality’ option and select it. This will show you all the available streaming qualities including Auto, High, Medium, and Low.

You can also change the quality to your preferred quality. By default, Amazon Music sets and recommends the audio quality to ‘Auto’. When on Wi-Fi, the app automatically adjusts the streaming quality based on your network connection while on cellular data it adjusts it to ‘Low’ to save on data. You can go ahead and set it by default to ‘Low’ or ‘Medium’ to save on data.

Use Amazon Music offline

One of the best features of the most recent app version is the ability to use it offline without an internet connection. When on Wi-Fi like at home, you can download your daily music before hitting the road and listen to these tracks in your car during the trip. To do this, open Amazon Music on your phone and select the song, playlist, or album that you want to save offline, and then tap on the three dots icon to access the menu. From the menu, select ‘Options’ and then tap on the ‘Add to My Music’ option. Finally, click the three dots icon once again to start the download. Exit the page and go back to the main menu window pop up and toggle on the ‘Offline Music Mode’ option. One thing to take note of is that only the songs that you downloaded will be available offline. So ensure that you download all your desired tracks before stepping out.

Restrict Amazon Music use to Wi-Fi only

If you don’t want the app to ever use your cellular data, you can restrict it to only work on Wi-Fi. Open Amazon Music and ensure you’re on the Browse page. On the top right-hand corner, tap on the three-dot icon and open the main menu. Select Settings from the list and scroll down to ‘Stream only on Wi-Fi’ and ‘Download only on Wi-Fi’ options and click on each of them to toggle them on if they’re off. This will make sure that Amazon Music never consumes your cellular data.

Duration	20 Minutes	1 hour
Data consumed	112 – 133MB	175MB – 1.2GB

FAQs

Do I get Amazon Music free when I purchase Amazon prime?

Yes, Amazon Music is a benefit inclusive of your Amazon Prime membership for free with no extra costs. It gives you access to over 2 million songs, playlists, and stations you can choose from.

How much data does Amazon Music HD use?

Amazon Music HD consumes up to 5.5MB per minute while Ultra HD uses up to 12MB of data per minute when you listen to the highest sample rates.

Final Thoughts

Though Amazon Music consumes a lot of data, there are ways to keep its usage low or avoid it from using any cellular data at all.