Google Play Music is the newest streaming music service on the block and it’s a solid contender to Spotify. One thing where Spotify has Google Play Music beat is data usage. Droid Life reports that one of its readers compared data usage between Google Play Music and Spotify by playing the same album with both services. Spotify used a paltry 26MB compared to Google Play Music’s 108MB. That’s over four times the data usage of Spotify.
Of course, this all depends on the settings within each app. While Spotify has options to dial back the bitrate of songs, Google Play Music All Access only has the ability to toggle “Stream at highest quality only.” This means that Google Play Music will dynamically choose a bitrate according to your connection if you have this setting disabled. If you have a solid connection, Google Play Music will stream at the highest quality: 320 kbps. Spotify, on the other hand has options for 96 kbps, 160 kbps, and 320 kbps. When both services play at 320 kbps, they use about the same amount of data, so it’s not really down to how each service compresses the music.
So if you’re using Google Play Music All Access on the go, make sure you have unlimited data or you can use up your cap by just listening to a few albums!
[Source: Droid Life]
