Article Summary
Pandora has three quality settings you can choose from to help you manage data usage. However, only the standard setting is available to Pandora free users.
At its standard setting streaming Pandora will use up just under 30MB per hour. At the higher setting you can expect to use over 85MB in an hour, while the low setting will use up less than 15MB per hour.
If movies have taught us anything, it's that life needs a soundtrack. How else are we supposed to know when something ominous is lurking? What other thing in the world can so perfectly let the world know just how happy we are?
Pandora, the streaming music service, has been providing the soundtrack for several lives for many years. There, however, could be a slight risk in using the service to stream the background music of your life; you might be using too much data.
Pandora Sound Quality and Bitrates
You can't really have a conversation about data usage and Pandora without talking about sound quality and bitrate—the amount of data processed (in bits) over a unit of time (usually per second). The bitrate at which you listen to music on Pandora is naturally going to have everything to do with how much data you're going to use with the music streaming service. Essentially, the higher the sound quality the higher the bitrate is going to be which ultimately means you'll be using more of your plan's data.
With the free version of Pandora you are limited to the service's Standard sound quality which streams at 64Kbps.
Pandora Plus and Premium subscribers have the option to toggle between the "Standard" sound quality option as well as "Low" at 32Kbps and High at 192kbps.
Breaking Down Pandora Data Usage
Bitrate numbers are decent guides for understanding data usage when streaming music, but they aren't exactly telling you how much data you are using.
So, let's say you wanted to listen to an hour of Pandora in its Standard sound quality setting at 64Kbps. Per minute you'd be using .48MB of data and for the entire hour of streaming you would use 28.8MB of data. Extend that hour to an entire day and you're looking at 691.2MB of data.
If you have a 5GB data plan, and did nothing with it but listen to Pandora at 64Kbps, you'd get a little over 7 days of streaming before reaching your data limit.
Pandora Data Usage
| Sound Quality (Bitrate) | Per Minute | Per Hour |
|---|---|---|
| Low (32Kbps) | 240KB | 14.4MB |
| Standard (64Kbps) | 480KB | 22.8MB |
| High (192Kbps) | 1.44MB | 86.4MB |
The Best Cell Phone Plan for Pandora
If you're an avid music streamer and Pandora is your service of choice, you should consider at least these two things:
- How much data do you need for other things outside of Pandora?
- How much Pandora are you realistically going to listen to?
After assessing your data needs, find a data plan that gives you enough high-speed data before possibly deprioritizing you in times of heavy network congestion.
Angelo Ilumba
Senior Writer
Thousands of cell phone plans unpacked. All the facts. No surprises.
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