Streaming Pandora/iHeart Radio vs. Streaming Google Play Music

[coachdvc]

One of the main reasons I made the switch from Sprint to Verizon is because I wanted to be able to use my phone when out and about and not connected to wifi. For example, streaming music through the Sprint network was next to impossible, regardless of whether it was Pandora or my own Google Music library. So now I'm with Verizon, and able to stream with no problem, but I need to keep an eye on my data usage since it's not unlimited (I have 2G plan).

I've had the phone/plan for 3 weeks and for the most part have been using iHeart Radio exclusively to stream music. Last night, I needed to drive for about an hour, so I decided I was going to stream my Google Music library for the trip. I understand that I can "add to device" my songs from the Google Music library, but I was hoping to keep them all in the cloud to save on space. Anyway, over the 3 week time period, iHeart Radio used 164mb. Last night, Google Music used 590mb. Why would Google Music have used so much more data than an app like iHeart Radio or Pandora?

 

[Jaycemiskel]

Because it's probably streaming higher quality. It will also stream ahead and cache so you're less likely to experience interruptions. One thing you can change though is go into settings and make sure that stream highest quality isn't checked. If it is, uncheck it and that should help some.

Sent from my Galaxy Nexus using Tapatalk 2

 

[dasaucemasta]

The same thing happened to me and I couldn't use data on my phone for twelve days because play music used .89 gb of music in a night. What happened was that in the background Google was syncing every song I played to my phone so it was downloading insane amounts of music to my phone over 4g.. Make sure the option to sync songs is off in your settings

 

[Luke Dobbs]

I have experienced the exact same issues. over similar periods of time, Google Music has used 2-3 times more data than Pandora streaming. I have "Cache during playback" checked, expecting it to cache songs as they stream. I expected this would save songs that are frequently played so they would not have to be streamed later, thus using less data. Is this not the case, and it is actually using more data caching? I also have "Automatically cache" checked which I thought only cached while on Wifi and charging. I also have stream quality set to "low". I am not sure I can get this app any leaner...

I have a Nexus 4 with only 16 GB of storage so I was hoping to keep my music in the cloud, but this is eating way too much carrier data. :'(