If Spotify feels fine when you first open it but gradually contributes more and more to your Mac's memory pressure over hours of continuous playback, that pattern is well documented, not something unique to your setup.
How long has this been an issue?
Spotify's own community forum has threads specifically about Mac memory leaks stretching back over five years, with the pattern remaining consistent: memory climbs steadily during use and doesn't reliably return to baseline even during quiet periods of playback. One widely referenced thread describes memory reaching 79GB before Spotify crashed outright. The recurrence of this complaint across years and multiple app versions suggests it's a persistent characteristic of how the app manages memory during long sessions, rather than a bug that gets fully resolved and then reappears.
What's likely driving it
Spotify's desktop app is built on web technologies (a Chromium Embedded Framework-based architecture, similar in spirit to many modern desktop apps), which brings the same general memory-management characteristics as a browser: cached artwork, audio buffers, and UI state can accumulate over a long session if they aren't aggressively cleaned up. Album art, playlist data, and audio pre-buffering for gapless playback all need to be held in memory, and if the app doesn't release older cached data as consistently as it should, usage climbs the way these reports describe.
What genuinely helps
Quit and reopen Spotify periodically. The most consistently reported fix. If you leave Spotify running for a full day, closing it and reopening it clears the accumulated memory and restarts from a clean baseline. Doing this once or twice during a long day of background listening is a reasonable habit.
Clear Spotify's cache. Spotify stores cached audio and artwork in ~/Library/Caches/com.spotify.client. You can clear this from within Spotify's own Settings (look for a "Clear Cache" option under Storage), which is safer than manually deleting the folder yourself and achieves the same result.
Disable hardware acceleration. Spotify's Settings include a hardware acceleration toggle, and disabling it is a documented troubleshooting step Spotify itself has suggested for various performance issues, including memory-related ones on certain Mac configurations. It's worth testing whether this changes your specific memory growth pattern.
Consider the web player for background listening. If you mainly use Spotify for background music rather than its full desktop feature set, running it in a browser tab via open.spotify.com avoids the native app's memory profile entirely, at the cost of losing some native integrations like media key support in certain configurations.
Is this likely to be fixed soon?
Given how long this pattern has persisted across app versions, it would be dishonest to promise an imminent fix. The practical stance worth taking is treating periodic restarts as a routine part of using Spotify for long listening sessions, the same way many people already treat browser restarts, rather than waiting for a permanent resolution.
Where a memory-relief tool fits in
Spotify's own accumulated memory needs Spotify itself restarted to clear fully, the same limitation as any app with an internal leak. What Shiny helps with is the rest of your Mac's memory picture while Spotify is running in the background: browser tabs, other apps, and orphaned helper processes that add up alongside whatever Spotify itself is holding. One click frees that up without needing to interrupt your music, which is a genuinely useful middle step between the Spotify restarts this issue still requires.
For other background-app memory patterns, see Electron apps on Mac: the growing footprint, which covers similar always-open background apps.
Does playlist size or listening habit make a difference?
Based on the pattern described across complaint threads, continuous long-session listening (playing music for many hours without quitting, common if Spotify is your default background app during a work day) shows the growth more clearly than short, frequent sessions where the app is naturally restarted often. If you tend to leave Spotify running for entire days without closing it, you're more likely to notice this than someone who quits most apps at the end of each task. This doesn't mean the underlying issue is your fault, it's a genuine characteristic of the app, but it does explain why some users report it much more severely than others using the same app version.
A quick way to check if it's happening to you right now
Open Activity Monitor, click the Memory tab, and note Spotify's current usage. Leave it playing in the background for a few hours during normal use, then check again without having quit it in between. If the figure has grown substantially with no corresponding increase in what you were actively doing in Spotify (switching playlists occasionally doesn't explain gigabytes of growth), you're seeing the same pattern these forum threads describe, and the fixes above apply directly to your situation. It's a quick, no-cost check worth doing before assuming something else on your Mac is to blame for a slowdown that's actually coming from your music player quietly running in the background the whole time.