Can you listen to music on the Garmin Forerunner 970?

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Absolutely! The Forerunner 970 is actually a solid music player, not just an afterthought.

You get 32GB of storage. Same as the fancy Fenix 8. That's room for thousands of songs, which means you can load up your entire running playlist collection and then some. No more picking and choosing which albums to sync.

The watch plays nice with all the major streaming services:

• Spotify
• Amazon Music
• Deezer
• YouTube Music

Or just drag and drop your own MP3 files if you're old school like that.

Fair warning about Spotify: syncing playlists is sloooow. Like, go make a coffee slow. Plan ahead and sync your music the night before a big run rather than scrambling in the morning.

For listening, you've got options. Pair your Bluetooth headphones and you're good to go. No dropouts in my experience. But here's a cool feature: the built-in speaker means you can actually listen without headphones at all. The sound quality isn't going to win any awards, but it's handy for catching a podcast on a recovery jog or hearing navigation prompts.

Battery life with music is pretty respectable too. You'll get 12-14 hours of GPS tracking while jamming to your tunes, depending on which satellite mode you're using. That's actually better than the previous 965 managed.

One heads up: some people have reported occasional Spotify glitches where the screen goes black. Usually a firmware update fixes it, so keep your watch updated.