Spotify to fix app that writes gigabytes of junk data to storage devices

By Mark Coppock Updated November 11, 2016

Spotify is a tremendously popular streaming music service, with free, ad-supported, and subscription options. It’s so popular, in fact, that literally millions of people use the Spotify app on a number of platforms many times a day to get their music fixes.

Unfortunately, some of those users are reporting a rather pernicious problem with the Spotify app running on Mac, Linux, and Windows machines. The bug apparently is causing the app to write gigabytes worth of junk data to users’ storage devices, according to Ars Technica.

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The information comes from numerous reports on the Spotify forum, Reddit, Hacker News, and on other sites around the internet. The Spotify app is writing massive amounts of data to hard drives and SSDs, even when idle, a behavior that Ars Technica was able to duplicate in their own environment.

The issue is so significant, in fact, that the Spotify app can write as much as 5GB to 10GB of data an hour to a drive, and accumulate up to 700GB of junk when the app is left running for more than a day. Not only does this use up space unnecessarily and potentially cause issues with machines running out of space, but writing so much extra data to a drive adds unnecessary wear and tear and shortens its lifespan.

Since the issue was first reported, Spotify issued a statement to 9to5Mac, and it’s good news. The company said, “We’ve seen some questions in our community around the amount of written data using the Spotify client on desktop. These have been reviewed and any potential concerns have now been addressed in version 1.0.42, currently rolling out to all users.”

The issue seems to involve database files including the “Mercury.db” string, and there are manual methods for dealing with it. The informal solutions are rather obscure, however, and it’s likely best to shut down the app completely, or uninstall it, and wait for Spotify to issue their fix. While it’s nice to enjoy hours and hours of streaming music, it’s not so nice to suffer the early demise of a hard drive or SSD. Better to be safe than sorry and maybe give another streaming music service a try until the new version rolls out to your machine.

Updated on 11-11-2016 by Mark Coppock: Added Spotify’s statement about an impending fix.

Computing Writer

Mark Coppock is a Freelance Writer at Digital Trends covering primarily laptop and other computing technologies. He has…

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When it comes to the best music streaming services out there, Spotify is probably the first app you think of. With 675 million users, and more than 260 million subscribers, it's miles ahead of competition like Apple Music. But what is Spotify, how does it work, and how much does it cost? We've got the answers to all your questions right here.
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What is Spotify?

If you spend even a little time online, you've probably heard of Spotify. It's a popular free and paid music-streaming service founded in Stockholm in 2006 by Swedish friends Daniel Ek and Martin Lorentzon. Fun fact: the name happened by fluke when the partners were shouting names back and forth from different rooms in Ek's Stockholm flat, and Ek misheard one of Lorentzon's suggestions as "Spotify." They later backtracked the meaning as a combination of spot and identify, and there you have it.
Spotify today is a behemoth of a streaming service that also offers access to podcasts, videos, and highly tailored playlists driven by your unique usage. With several plan tiers to choose from, Spotify's free version lets you listen to unlimited music, podcasts, and even videos, so you can explore your taste without shelling out a thing, but you do have to endure ads and limited functionality (more on that below). It does offer much more robust paid options (more below, too), but the free version is more than enough for the casual listener.
Spotify is also quite device-versatile, so you can use it on your smartphone, tablet, computer, laptop, TV, smartwatch, gaming console, and even in your car. You get the expected, intuitive controls like play/pause, next/previous, loop a song/playlist, and save favorites. But that's not all. There's a lot that Spotify offers, so let's break down what you can look forward to.
Spotify features: music, podcasts, audiobooks, and more