In short: Apple Music can drain a lot of battery when it's continuously running in the background, either syncing with another device or downloading music from your Library. It's frustrating to open your iPhone and notice a significant drop in battery life, especially when you're listening to songs on Apple Music.
Reddit user ritty84, for example, shows that Apple Music accounts for 95 percent of their battery usage; another on Apple's own forums shows the app using 53 percent of their battery, while other screenshots show it running in the background for nearly 20 hours.
It can still play ~50-100hrs of music in flight mode, while having about 60% battery capacity. The iPhone 7 would die in 10 hours or less.
Judging by these (barely scientific) results, every added bar of volume will kill a whopping 0.001875 percent of your phone's battery after playing a three-minute song. For comparison, I left my phone's display on with all apps closed and the phone set to airplane mode.
Yes, even if you keep turning off your phone to listen to music, it will still drain your phone's battery.
Lithium batteries deteriorate whether you're using them or not. If you keep the phone on charge over-night, playing music won't affect the battery, because it will stay topped up. For your own safety, make sure that the phone is on a firm surface away from the bed—never stick it under the pillow!
Some users are reporting losing as much as 30% of their battery an hour while listening to music or podcasts. Obviously, the Spotify battery draining issue has something to do with the latest version of iOS – but it's difficult to troubleshoot the exact issue.
The radio itself doesn't use an awful lot of power, so it's very unlikely that you're going to end up with a dead battery from one listening session. On average, a regular car battery that's powering a regular car radio will generally keep going for a whopping 10 to 12 hours.
The results, shown above, show that Google Play Music drains over 2X less battery compared to Spotify, and Pandora drains 70% less battery than Spotify.
Our battery-drain testing shown in Figure 1 of our previous blog revealed that in foreground music playback, Spotify performs far worse than all of its competitors, draining battery at alarming 55% and 23% faster than Apple Music and Google Play Music, respectively.
Streaming apps like Spotify (particularly bad on Cellular) will use a lot of battery. If you carry your phone with you I recommend using the iPhone for streaming instead.
After all the songs in an album or playlist have finished playing, the Apple Music feature, Autoplay, will play music from your collection or random music. The Autoplay icon looks like an infinity symbol, so you can look out for that symbol when you try to turn it off.
If the onset of your battery drain is sudden, it may be that an app updated or your phone installed a patch. The newer version could contain features that are more resource intensive, or has a bug which runs your battery dry. Check to see if any apps have updated recently.
Several users have reported the Spotify app to drain battery much faster than usual. In fact, some users are sharing stats of the Spotify app draining almost 32 percent of the overall battery life.
After trying it as parental control to limit media consumption I realized that background audio does not count towards the screen time. It is the same for all services like Apple Music, Play Music and Spotify.
Go to Settings > General > Background App Refresh. From the list of apps shown, use the toggle to turn Background App Refresh on or off for each app.
Display brightness and screen time-out settings
The brightness of your iPhone screen can have a significant impact on your battery life. If your display is too bright, it can quickly drain your battery. Similarly, if your screen timeout settings are set for too long, it can also reduce your battery life.
The biggest battery drainers are social media apps, including Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Snapchat, YouTube and WhatsApp. They are in the top 20, and all allow 11 features to run in the background. Android and Iphones will refresh background apps periodically by default. This uses your phone's battery and your data.
Apart from causing you to miss out on all the sounds that surround you, generally speaking, listening to music does not harm your body. It does not damage your liver, poison your lungs or fry your brain. It is not possible to listen to too much music.
The higher the level of sound and longer the duration, the greater the risk of hearing loss. For example, you can safely listen to a sound level of 80dB for up to 40 hours a week. If the sound level is 90dB, the safe listening time reduces to four hours per week.
Though 78 minutes seems to be the optimal amount of listening time, an average of just 11 minutes per day can deliver therapeutic benefits. To boost feelings of happiness, just five minutes of music can do the trick. “There are certain properties of music that affect the mind and body.
While some claimed that Spotify gobbles around 30% battery life in merely half an hour, others reported that the music streaming app eats into more than 50% of battery life on their iPhone.
Does Spotify use a lot of data? Comparatively, Spotify does not use a lot of data, especially compared to video streaming services which can sometimes use up to 7GB per hour at a time. In the most extreme cases, it can use up to 144MB per hour but that's only on the Very High audio quality option.