What you need to know
- Spotify detailed the launch of “Offline Backup,” a feature that piggybacks off the stored cache data of your music to operate.
- Offline Backup is a playlist on your “Home” tab that collects your music data from your recently played to give you tunes if your signal drops.
- This update is rolling out on Android and iOS and joins Spotify’s recent AI Playlist.
Spotify’s rolling out a feature for mobile users that should make that loss of service a little more bearable.
Hitting the town often comes with the risk of losing cell service, which is what Spotify aims to solve in today’s update. As detailed in a Newsroom post, mobile users are beginning to receive “Offline Backup,” a feature that compiles your music into a playlist ready to go without cell service. Spotify states this feature will appear on the “Home” tab whenever you’ve gone offline.
Tapping it expands into a playlist; however, there’s a caveat. For Offline Backup’s functionality, users must have recently played “more than five songs” and have the feature enabled. The playlist can be added to “Your Library.”
The Offline Backup playlist can be organized and filtered. The post states users can sort tunes based on artist, mood, and genre.
Spotify states that it keeps your recently played songs within a cache on your device if you’re listening regularly. Offline Backup is pulling music from that stored data to remove the necessity of relying on a stable connection to grab the music.
More importantly, Offline Backup shouldn’t appear “dated” or out of touch with your habits. Spotify adds that (if enabled) it will continue to dip into what you’ve heard recently and refresh the offline playlist.
Spotify’s Offline Backup playlist is rolling out to Premium users today (Oct 3). Users on Android and iOS should see it “this week” alongside Android Auto and Apple CarPlay.
This is the second update to hit Spotify in the past couple of weeks. At the end of September, the company introduced its AI Playlist to more regions. U.S., Canadian, and New Zealand users can find a curated collection of songs that may pique their interest. Tapping the “+” icon on mobile will produce a drop-down menu with AI Playlist listed.
Users can give the streaming service’s AI a prompt and it’ll try and compile an ideal playlist to fit your needs. Spotify encourages users to be as descriptive as possible to aid the AI. Users can toss in details like a specific genre, decade, mood, favorite artist, and more to create a unique, personal playlist.
