Where are saved Spotify songs stored?

Spotify is a popular music streaming service that was launched in 2008. It allows users to browse, search, play, and manage music from a library of over 70 million songs. Spotify uses a freemium business model, offering both free ad-supported and premium ad-free plans. Users can create playlists, share music with friends, and get recommendations tailored to their taste.

In this article, we’ll provide an overview of how Spotify works and where your songs are stored when you add them to your library or playlists. We’ll cover topics like Spotify’s local cache, servers, your personal library, downloading songs for offline listening, file formats, how Spotify gets access to songs, podcasts and other content storage, and user data privacy.

Local Cache

Songs you play on Spotify are cached locally on your device to allow for quicker streaming without needing to re-download each time. This local cache stores parts of songs, playlists, albums, or podcast episodes temporarily after you listen to them the first time.

Having this local cache allows you to listen to songs again more quickly, as Spotify doesn’t need to fully download the song again from its servers if you’ve played it recently. The size of the local cache varies across devices, but can often store up to several gigabytes of cached Spotify content.

Typically, Spotify will automatically delete and refresh parts of your local cache after a certain period of inactivity. This prevents the cache from taking up too much storage space on your device. However, you can manually clear or change the local cache settings in Spotify’s settings if needed.

Spotify Servers

Spotify stores all of its music on its own servers for streaming. When you search for and play a song on Spotify, you are streaming audio files from Spotify’s servers in real-time rather than playing a file stored locally on your device. According to Quora, Spotify stores high-quality audio files encoded at 320kbps for streaming.

The audio files are licensed from record labels and rights holders. As of 2021, Spotify had licensing agreements for over 70 million songs globally. Though library sizes can vary slightly by country, Spotify has one of the largest licensed streaming catalogs in the world. This allows you to search for and play the vast majority of music by mainstream artists.

Your Library

Your Library on Spotify refers to the section where your personal content is stored, such as playlists you’ve created, albums and songs you’ve liked, and podcasts you follow. This library is unique to your Spotify account and syncs across all your devices so you have access to your content wherever you use Spotify ¹.

Playlists are stored in Your Library under the Playlists tab. When you add songs to a playlist by liking them, those song choices are saved in your account’s library. Spotify will keep track of all the playlists you make and the contents of those playlists.

Liked songs are also stored in Your Library under the Songs tab. Any song you favorite by tapping the heart icon will be added here. You can view all your liked songs in one place and access them across devices.

Your Library syncs across mobile, desktop, web, and other Spotify apps. So playlists, likes, and podcast follows will be up to date across your phone, computer, tablet, etc. This allows you to seamlessly switch between devices while retaining access to your personal content ².

Downloading Songs

One of the key features of Spotify is the ability to download songs for offline playback when you don’t have an internet connection. This allows Spotify users to listen to music on-the-go without using mobile data or relying on WiFi.

There are some limits on how many songs you can download based on the type of Spotify account you have. For free Spotify users, the download limit is 10,000 songs per registered device (Source). For Spotify Premium subscribers, there is no explicit song download limit stated in Spotify’s terms of service. However, the number of downloads may be restricted by available storage space on your device (Source).

The audio quality of downloaded Spotify songs depends on your subscription tier. Free users can download songs at up to 160 Kbps, while Spotify Premium members can download up to 320 Kbps quality on desktop and extreme quality (around 256 Kbps) on mobile. So downloading songs with a paid subscription provides higher audio fidelity than the free tier (Source).

File Formats

Spotify uses a few different audio formats for streaming and downloading songs, the main ones being MP3, AAC, and Ogg Vorbis.^[1]

MP3 is the most common digital audio format. It compresses audio files while still maintaining good sound quality. MP3 files are relatively small in size compared to lossless formats.

AAC (Advanced Audio Coding) is another compressed format that is commonly supported across devices and streaming platforms. The sound quality of AAC is slightly better than MP3 at similar bitrates. AAC files are usually smaller in size than MP3s.

Ogg Vorbis is an open source audio format often used by Spotify for streaming. It compresses files at smaller sizes than MP3 but aims to produce better audio quality. However, device compatibility for Ogg Vorbis is not as widespread as MP3 and AAC.^[2]

For downloading songs from Spotify, users can choose between MP3 (96, 160, or 320 kbps) and AAC (256 kbps). The higher the bitrate, the better the audio quality and larger the file size. 320 kbps MP3 offers excellent quality, while still being highly compatible and moderately compact in size.

In summary, Spotify utilizes modern audio formats like AAC and Ogg Vorbis for efficient streaming, while also offering classic MP3s for downloading songs. There are always tradeoffs between audio quality and file size when choosing a format.

^[1] https://www.drmare.com/spotify-music/convert-spotify-to-aac.html

^[2] https://www.audkit.com/spotify-music/play-spotify-through-pro-tools.html

How Spotify Gets Songs

In order to stream music on its platform, Spotify must license the rights to songs from record labels and publishers. Spotify has licensing deals with all the major record labels like Universal Music Group, Sony Music Entertainment, and Warner Music Group, as well as many independent labels (Source).

These licensing deals allow Spotify to stream the labels’ catalogs of music. In exchange, Spotify pays royalty fees each time a song is streamed. The streaming royalties are distributed to the rights holders, including the record label, artists, songwriters, and publishers. According to some reports, Spotify pays about $0.006 to $0.0084 per stream to the rights holders. However, the exact per-stream rate remains private as part of Spotify’s licensing agreements (Source).

The share of royalties that artists receive depends on their individual contracts with their record labels and publishers. Many have argued that the streaming royalty payouts are too low, making it challenging for artists to earn a living from streaming alone.

Podcasts and Other Content

In addition to music, Spotify also offers podcasts, audiobooks, and other non-music audio content. This content is stored separately from music files on Spotify’s servers.

Podcasts on Spotify come from various providers like podcast studios, media companies, influencers, and everyday creators. Spotify hosts the podcast files on its servers like any other streaming audio service. When a user saves or downloads a podcast episode, it is streamed or downloaded from Spotify’s servers, not stored locally on the user’s device by default.

According to Spotify’s support page, “If you host your podcast with Spotify, your audio library is where you’ll find any audio you’ve ever created or imported into your Spotify for Podcasters account” (https://support.spotify.com/us/podcasters/article/your-audio-library/). So podcasters can upload episodes to Spotify which are then stored on Spotify’s servers.

Overall, Spotify houses a massive catalog of podcasts and other non-music content on its servers globally. This allows users to stream the content on demand like they do with music tracks.

User Data

Spotify stores a variety of user data in order to personalize and improve the listening experience. This includes:

Playlists – Any playlists you have created are stored on Spotify’s servers so they are available across devices.

Listening history – Spotify logs the songs, albums, artists and podcasts you listen to in order to make recommendations and tailor browse features to your taste.
Favorites – Any music, podcasts, or other content you “like” is stored to build up your taste profile.
Preferences – Settings like preferred streaming quality and volume level are stored.

All of this personal data is linked to your account and used by Spotify to improve the service. However, Spotify has faced scrutiny over data practices like turning user data into anonymous reports. They were fined 5 million euros in 2022 for alleged GDPR violations relating to user data transparency.

Conclusion

To recap, Spotify stores user songs and data on servers in multiple data centers around the world. While a local cache of songs exists on each user’s device, the true location of saved Spotify songs is on Spotify’s vast storage infrastructure in the cloud.

Spotify has an enormous storage system to hold over 70 million tracks plus podcasts, user data, playlists and more. They use a microservices architecture with systems like Apache Cassandra to manage this huge amount of data in a fast, efficient way. The scale of their storage is immense, spanning multiple data centers and geographical regions. But to the end user, it appears seamless as songs sync across devices.

In conclusion, saved Spotify songs primarily reside in Spotify’s network of data centers. Local caches provide quick access on devices, but the cloud stores the complete collection of each user’s library and data.