How to clear, change or move the Spotify cache

Spotify is a popular music streaming service that is available as a free and premium service for most operating systems. The service uses a cache on the host system which can fill up rather quickly, depending on how actively the service is being used.

While that may not be an issue for most users, it may be for some, as the service uses up to 10% of the free disk space of the primary hard drive for caching. It can grow quite large because of that. If you have 20 Gigabytes of free space, the cache may take up to 2 Gigabyte, if you have 200 Gigabytes free, it may take up to 20 Gigabytes and so on.

If you have noticed that disk space has gone down after you have started to use Spotify, you may want to either modify the caching preferences of the service to reduce the amount of disk space reserved for the service, or clear the disk cache regularly to free it up.

Change the Spotify cache size

To change the size of the cache do the following:

1. Open the Spotify client on your system. This example uses the Windows client.
2. Click on Edit > Preferences or use the Ctrl-P shortcut to open the program options.
3. Scroll all the way down until you find the cache entry here.

You have two options when it comes to the size of the cache. You can set it dynamically to a maximum of 10% of the free disk space, or select a fixed maximum size for it instead. To do so, switch to the "use at most" option and use the slider to set a fixed max cache size. This size can be between 1 and 100 Gigabytes.

A 1 Gigabyte cache can store about 200 songs. If it runs out of space, the least played songs will be automatically removed and replaced with new tracks.

Move the Spotify cache

You can use the same menu for that. All you have to do is click on the browse button and select a different location for the cache.

This can be useful if your main hard drive or partition is running out of space. Just move the cache to another drive and you are all set.

Note that the existing cache will be moved to the new location automatically so that you do not lose access to any offline tracks.

Clear the Spotify cache

Deleting the cache to free up disk space is another thing that you may want to consider, especially if you do not save songs for offline listening.

All you have to do is clear the contents of the Spotify "Storage" folder. The default location on Windows Vista or newer is C:\Users\Martin\AppData\Local\Spotify\Storage\

You can look up the location in the caching preferences. Just delete all files and folders inside storage.

Please note that you need to close Spotify to clear all cached files and folders.