Compared to video, music streaming uses very little data. Spotify streams audio at different bitrates depending on your settings: Low (about 24 kbps), Normal (about 96 kbps), High (about 160 kbps) and Very High (about 320 kbps). Our calculator uses an average of 0.15 GB per hour, which reflects the High setting most people use.
At that rate, listening for two hours a day on your commute adds up to roughly 9 GB per month. Even heavy listeners rarely go beyond 20 GB monthly — a fraction of what a single evening of 4K video can use. Podcasts generally use less data than music, while video podcasts use as much as any other video stream.
If you are on a small mobile plan, Spotify Premium lets you download playlists and albums over Wi-Fi, so listening offline uses no mobile data at all. You can also set separate quality levels for Wi-Fi and cellular streaming in the app's Audio Quality settings, keeping Very High for home and Normal on the go.
Apple Music, Amazon Music and other audio services use similar amounts, although lossless and spatial audio modes can use significantly more — lossless at CD quality is roughly 0.6 GB per hour, and hi-res lossless can exceed 1.5 GB per hour.
Use the calculator to combine Spotify with the other services in your household. It's a quick way to see that audio is rarely the reason you run out of data — video almost always is.