Fix Play Music High Battery and Data Usage in Android

Last Updated on July 28, 2017

If you have got the Google Play Music installed on your phone, the chances are that it may be using a lot of data and perhaps your battery too. That’s true for a lot of devices which use Google’s service to sync their music from their online library to their phones.

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Anyone with a subscription to Google Play Music can use Google’s servers to stream music and store tracks to get access to them anywhere. The problem with this is that when you start listening to the songs, the Play Music app will temporarily download the track to play.

Fix High Battery and Data Usage in Google Play Music

In the process of downloading and streaming, the app uses a lot of data and consequently your battery juice. I recently got myself the Play Music subscription and noticed that the app used a total of ~800MB of data in the last week.

While this data isn’t much when compared to apps like YouTube, the battery usage is a matter of concern.

Since the Play Music is a streaming app, it is quite obvious that it will use more data than other apps on your phone. Whenever you play a song on your phone using this app, the Play Music caches it’s data into your device’s storage. This causes high data usage.

If you have got an extensive library, this high data usage in Play Music is just inevitable. Once the song is in the cache, the app won’t download it again. Normally, the option to cache music while streaming is ON, but you should make sure that it is turned ON.

Open the Play Music app and go to Settings > Cache music while streaming. Make sure that this option is ON. If it is disabled, the app will download all your music every time you play a song. That will constitute to high data and battery usage.

If can bear with it, try streaming in low quality. This will significantly reduce the amount of data used, but the audio quality will suffer. Go to Play Music > Settings > PLAYBACK heading. Look for Quality on the Mobile network. By default, this setting is set to normal. Change it to Low.

Set the Quality on the wifi network to High or Always High depending on the bandwidth you have. Normally, WiFi networks don’t suffer the same constraints as mobile networks, so High or Always High should work fine for most people.

Scroll down a little to the DOWNLOADING section in the Settings. Make sure that the Download quality is set to Normal and Download only on Wi-Fi is checked.

Make Playlist of the Songs Which you Play the Most

If you are listening to a song which is present in an album, the app will cache the whole album for your convenience. This also causes a lot of data usage. While Google hasn’t provided us with an option to disable this behavior, you can do one thing.

You can make playlists for the songs which you listen the most. In the app, click on the options menu and add the song to the playlist. Give the playlist any name. Then download that playlist. On Wifi the app will download only this album, so your data usage will decrease significantly.

If you have got any other issue with the Play Music app on Android apart from High data and battery usage, please use the comments section to let me know.

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Written by Utkarsh

Utkarsh Bhatt is a certified tech expert and software engineer for a Fortune 500 Company. He was born in 1995, making him one of the oldest members of the team at EFX. Utkarsh loves solving technical issues and is always the first to jump on any problem that needs solving. When he’s not coding or debugging, he enjoys playing video games (especially Super Smash Bros.) and watching cartoons.

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2 thoughts on “Fix Play Music High Battery and Data Usage in Android”

  1. Yes Hi hello sir are dying I have read your comments above and have dressed on them and switched everything over most of them were already switched from when I got my new phone when I open Google Play Music and I click to play a song that only play for about 10 seconds and then I completely closes the app can you please help me fix this my emails key her idea gmail.com

    Reply
  2. Sorry about that only about half of that email is right when I open Google Play Music and I clicked the play button in the bottom corner to play a song it only allows reach for the song for 10 seconds then completely crashes the google play app and closes it every time I’ve tried cleaning the cash in the background and I’ve tried and installing and re installing and it is still consulate working I thought it was my phone so I contacted Samsung and they sent me a completely different from but that’s not it it must be some of the spyware or software in the application itself can you please get back to me at [email protected] please and thank you

    Reply

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