“Had it not been possible to get a smaller image from LastFM, I would have sampled the bitmap down to obtain a smaller image.”

That’s what Picasso is supposed to do for you, but I recommend using Glide, as I found it to be much more memory friendly in real apps. Under no circumstances should an image loading library ever be attempting to allocate 78MB of memory, that’s very unfortunate the default behavior is to do that (without using .fit etc as mentioned below). Glide will downsample the image into the size it needs to fit the view and do it automatically by default.