So I very rarely use Spotify, but I need to land on a music streaming service instead of bouncing around all the place. However, I have noticed that when I’m using data (versus WiFi), like in the car, service gets really spotty, and music buffers. I have a really good data plan, and never encounter spotty streaming on the move like I do with Spotify. Is this a known issue?
There’s really too many variables to say, depending on that tower’s congestion levels on any given day, your phone, how fast you’re driving, etc., etc. Maybe also Spotify CDN issues. You can run fancy network diagnostics but there wouldn’t really be anything you could do to fix those issues anyway. Except maybe try a VPN to see if it helps at all (I doubt it would).
However, Spotify (at least on a paid plan) lets you do two things to help with this:
- You can download songs/albums/playlists ahead of time, while you’re on wi-fi, so they’re already cached on your phone
- You can also change the streaming bitrate to a lower quality to ensure smoother playback at the cost of sound quality
I think those are table stakes for any streaming service these days. If you don’t particularly want to pay for Spotify and are already part of another ecosystem (Apple Music, YouTube Music, Amazon Music, etc.), they should let you do the same thing.
They are all pretty much the same. I much prefer YouTube Music over Spotify but it’s very subjective. You get YouTube Premium (YouTube with no commercials) with YouTube Music which is a big benefit.