New Spotify Feature Keeps the Music Flowing When You’re Off the Grid
Toggle Dark Mode
While Spotify is criticized by iPhone music fans for its reluctance to embrace the Apple ecosystem and its weaker support for artists, the music streaming giant still comes up with some clever tricks that Apple Music could learn.
Last month, we highlighted how Spotify’s new AI Playlists starkly contrasted Apple Intelligence’s complete lack of meaningful music curation features. Now, Spotify has introduced another handy feature for folks who often find themselves with spotty Wi-Fi or cellular coverage.
Blandly dubbed Offline Backup, the name belies how much time this feature can save for those who regularly hop planes or travel in underground transit systems that leave them lacking an internet connection. It even helps those with limited data plans save a few gigabytes every month.
Put simply, Offline Backup is designed to ensure that you always have a local copy of your favorite tracks ready to go so you can listen to them anywhere.
It does this by analyzing anything you’ve recently listened to or that you might want to listen to from your queued tracks and puts them in a special playlist just for you.
Have you ever hopped on a plane only to realize you forgot to download your favorite playlist? Are you looking for ways to save data with your data plan while still listening to your favorite artists? When the need for music is high and you find yourself offline, Spotify has you covered. Beginning today, we’re launching Offline Backup, bringing Premium users another way to keep listening to music offline, no downloads required.Spotify
Like Apple Music, Spotify already lets you download tracks and playlists manually for offline listening (as long as you’re a paying subscriber, of course). Offline Backup effectively automates this process, so you’ll hopefully have fewer moments when you realize you forgot to download your latest favorites before getting on a plane or heading underground.
The Offline Backup playlist appears automatically in your Home feed whenever Spotify detects you’re offline, although you can add it to your library for easier access. Since it can get unwieldy for those with varied and eclectic musical tastes, Spotify lets you filter and sort it by artist, mood, or genre.
You’ll only get a single Offline Backup playlist for now, although you can also access any automatically downloaded tracks from your standard playlists. Spotify also says it “evolves as you continue to listen, so you’ll always have something new.”
Although Apple Music caches tracks you’ve recently listened to, it’s an opaque process, so it’s hard to be confident that your favorite music will be available when you’re offline unless you’ve taken the time to download it manually in advance. Spotify’s Offline Backup is one of those features that we hope Apple takes note of, along with the new AI Playlists, which seem like they should already be a core part of Apple Intelligence.
Offline Backup is available to Spotify Premium users globally starting today. Ensure that you’ve updated to the latest version of the app and switched it on in the app under Settings > Data Saving > Offline or Storage. Spotify also notes that you must have recently listened to at least five songs to trigger it.
