Streaming your music is great until you hit a patch with no connectivity or a long flight where you might need to download your music. Being able to download your music to your phone also sounds great, until you realize that Spotify’s online cache is eating up more storage than the music itself.
Apart from adding features no one really asked for, Spotify can’t seem to figure out local storage. For anyone on a small SSD or a phone with limited storage, that means several gigabytes of space disappearing without a clear explanation from the app.
Offline downloads and cache are not the same thing
One is intentional. The other quietly hoards storage in the background.
When you think about Spotify’s storage consumption, you’re dealing with two separate aspects: your offline downloads and the cache. Offline downloads are the obvious part. These are the albums, playlists, and podcasts you explicitly mark to be available when you’re not connected to the internet. They live in a dedicated storage location, and on many devices, you can even choose where that goes, like an SD card or a secondary drive.
The cache, however, is where things get interesting. It’s a stash of temporary data that includes chunks of songs you’ve streamed, album art, and various bits Spotify keeps so it can start playing instantly without re-downloading everything every time. The catch is that this cache doesn’t show up clearly in the interface, and it isn’t tied directly to what you’ve chosen to download, so it can keep growing in the background.
How Spotify’s cache can grow bigger than your playlists
Every stream, skip, and replay leaves behind digital leftovers
In a perfect world, the cache would behave like a neat revolving door: once it hits a sensible limit, old data gets tossed out automatically to make room for new listening. In reality, you might see a Spotify folder that can swell up to 5 to 10 GB, even if your actual offline library is only a fraction of that.
This is caused by a few factors. First, your listening history never really stops accumulating. Every track you stream gets partially cached, so the next playback is smoother, and over months of daily listening, those cached chunks add up.
Second, your quality settings matter more than you might think. If you’ve cranked streaming and download quality up to the highest possible setting, each track is much larger, so both your downloads and the cache balloon accordingly. There are other streaming settings that can instantly improve sound quality, so make sure you’re setting yourself up correctly.
Third, most of us use Spotify on more than one platform—phone, laptop, maybe a work PC—and each installation maintains its own cache in hidden app data folders. Last but not least, updates sometimes leave behind offline files that no longer belong to your current install but also never got cleaned up, quietly consuming even more space for no good reason.
The problem is worse on smaller phones and tablets
Limited storage turns invisible data into a real headache
This problem becomes most obvious on devices where storage is already tight. On a desktop with a 2 TB drive, a 6 GB Spotify folder is annoying, but not a crisis. On a 128GB laptop SSD or phone’s internal storage, it’s the difference between a snappy system and constant storage warnings.
Android users, in particular, can be caught off guard because even when they move downloads to an SD card, the cache itself usually stays in the phone’s internal storage, so the OS still reports Spotify as a heavy storage hog. To make matters worse, toggling albums or playlists offline doesn’t instantly reclaim the underlying cached data either. Tracks can hang around in the cache for a while in case you re-enable them, which means you feel like you did some cleanup, but the actual space doesn’t come back as expected.
You might also see a phantom usage effect if you uninstall and reinstall the app, hoping to start fresh, only to find that the system storage is still suspiciously full. That’s often because the OS hasn’t recalculated storage yet, or because old data folders were left behind outside the app’s normal uninstall routine.
The result is a frustrating disconnect. Inside Spotify, it looks like you only have a modest offline library. But when you open your phone or PC’s storage settings, Spotify might be eating up a ton of space. In many cases, this gap is almost entirely cache and leftover files rather than music you actually listen to.
How to clear Spotify’s cache and reclaim your space
A quick cleanup that won’t delete your downloads
Amir M. Bohlooli / MakeUseOfCredit: Amir M. Bohlooli / MakeUseOf
The first step to reclaiming your storage is to understand that the app’s own storage figures are only half the story. If you want to really see how much space Spotify is eating, you have to look at it from the operating system’s perspective.
On mobile, that usually means going into the app storage section in your system settings and checking how much space Spotify is listed as using overall. The app will often give you a separate cache number in its own settings, and clearing that can instantly free up gigabytes without touching your downloads. Clearing Spotify’s “ghost” downloads can also help.
On a desktop, things are a bit more hands-on. You might need to find Spotify’s data folders under locations like AppData on Windows or the Library and Caches folder on macOS. With Spotify closed, you can delete the cache directory or its contents, and the app will simply rebuild a smaller, fresh cache when you launch it again.
If you have the option, it’s also worth moving your downloads off your primary drive. On platforms that allow it, you can point Spotify’s download location to an SD card or secondary disk so that your offline library isn’t competing with the OS and other apps for precious internal storage. You can even use OS tricks like symbolic links, quotas, or third-party tools, so Spotify physically cannot let its cache grow beyond a certain size.
How to stop Spotify from eating your storage again
A few small tweaks can keep things under control
If Spotify has been quietly eating your storage, you’re not imagining it, and you’re not alone. The takeaway isn’t to stop downloading music, it’s to remember that streaming apps don’t just store what you explicitly save. They also keep a working cache to speed things up, and over time, that cache can get surprisingly large.
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A quick check in your system storage settings, plus an occasional cache clear, can claw back several gigabytes without breaking anything. And if you’re constantly tight on space, consider lowering the quality or moving downloads to removable storage if possible.
