hile it’s getting easier to stay online on the go in London, a spotty connection can still stop your fave podcast or album in its tracks.
Thankfully, Spotify is trying to solve that with an upcoming feature that takes advantage of its recommendation technology.
As part of the update, the music streaming service will essentially create an automatic playlist of your recently played songs for you to listen to offline. That means the tracks should be available irrespective of whether you have an internet or mobile data connection.
Spotify CEO Daniel Ek tweeted that the company is testing the new feature, which almost certainly guarantees that it will be released soon.
Best of all, the new collection should keep you jamming for a while. In the screenshot shared by Ek, the “Your Offline Mix” playlist has a duration of 3 hours and 31 minutes.
The pic also contained the following description: “A mix of your recently played songs for when the wine is high, but your connection is low.”
While it may sound innovative, Spotify isn’t the first music streaming service to offer the feature. That distinction goes to YouTube Music. Currently only available to subscribers, YouTube Music’s offline mixtape automatically keeps between one to 100 songs saved on your device.
How to download music to listen to offline on Spotify
While you wait for Spotify’s new feature, there’s nothing stopping you from simply downloading music to your phone anyway.
Like with YouTube Music, the option is only available to premium users who pay for Spotify, though free users can download podcasts. While there’s currently no way to download individual tracks, you can put them in a playlist first and download that instead.
To listen to stuff online, just head to what you want to save and tap the download button (a downward-pointing arrow).
You’ll see a circular bar fill up as your download progresses, and the icon will turn green when it’s complete.
If for some reason the download is unsuccessful, you can tap refresh to try again.
You can manually remove downloads by pressing the same green arrow, or via the storage option in settings.
By default, Spotify only downloads audio over the internet as doing so on 4G or 5G zaps a lot of data. Nonetheless, you can enable mobile data downloads by going to your settings by tapping the gear icon on the home page.
Next, scroll down to “audio quality” and, under downloads, switch on “download using mobile data”.
