Clear the Spotify Cache on Mac

Spotify caches every track you stream so replays start instantly instead of re-downloading. Useful — until the cache quietly grows to 10 GB or more. Clearing it takes four clicks inside Spotify, and since the app rebuilds the cache as you listen, there's nothing to undo and nothing to lose.

Clear the cache from Spotify's settings

1. Open Spotify and click your profile picture in the top-right corner, then choose Settings.
2. Scroll down to the Storage section. Spotify shows exactly how much disk space the cache is using right now.
3. Click Clear cache.
4. Confirm in the dialog that appears.

That's the whole job. The trade-off is mild and temporary: the first replay of a song after clearing streams it fresh, so you'll use a little more bandwidth until the cache warms back up. On a metered connection, clear it right before you're back on Wi-Fi.

How big is too big? Spotify manages the cache itself and trims it under disk pressure, so a few gigabytes on a roomy drive is nothing to fix. It's worth clearing when the Storage section shows double-digit gigabytes on a small SSD, when you're hunting space before a macOS update, or when Spotify itself is misbehaving — a stale cache is the first thing Spotify's own support has you clear.

What clearing does — and doesn't — remove

The cache and your downloads are separate things, and the Clear cache button only touches the first:

• Removed: cached copies of streamed songs, artwork, and browsing data — everything Spotify saved opportunistically.
• Kept: playlists and podcast episodes you explicitly downloaded for offline listening, your playlists and library, and your login session.

Downloads show up separately in the same Storage section with their own size figure and their own removal control, so you can see at a glance whether it's the cache or your offline library that's actually eating the disk. If the downloads number is the big one, removing a few albums or podcast seasons you no longer play offline will free far more than clearing the cache ever could — and you can re-download any of it later at no cost beyond bandwidth.

Find the cache on disk

The Storage section also shows the offline storage location — the folder where all of this lives. By default it's inside ~/Library/Caches/com.spotify.client. To check its size from Terminal:

# how big is Spotify's cache right now?
du -sh ~/Library/Caches/com.spotify.client

You can quit Spotify and drag that folder to the Trash — Spotify recreates it cleanly on next launch, which is what makes this reversible-by-design. But the in-app button does the same thing with less risk of grabbing the wrong folder, so prefer it unless Spotify won't launch at all.

Keep it from ballooning again

Two habits keep Spotify's footprint sane. First, use the offline storage location setting in that same Storage section to move the cache to an external drive if your Mac's SSD is small — Spotify will store both cache and downloads there. Second, audit your downloads occasionally: a few 200-episode podcast subscriptions set to auto-download will outgrow any cache. The cache self-manages; downloads only shrink when you remove them.

Spotify isn't the only hoarder

Browsers, Adobe apps, and developer tools all keep caches that grow the same way. For the system-wide sweep — what's safe to clear and what rebuilds itself — see how to clear cache on Mac.