Living in South Africa means putting up with some drawbacks: the occasional loss of signal – or worse, Wi-Fi – being two of them. We can’t promise to make it any better, but we can promise that Spotify is working on a way to make those moments a little less torturous. It’s doing so with Offline Backup, a new feature that’ll keep the hits rollin’, no matter what. Did we mention that no data is required?
You want some backup?
Offline Backup will automatically generate a playlist when the internet disappears. It isn’t doing so by sneakily downloading a playlist when you’re on the home WiFi either, like YouTube’s ‘Smart’ downloads. Instead, should your connection suddenly self-delete, Spotify fills in the blanks with a playlist generated from your queue and recently streamed tracks from the cache.
Offline Backup was initially pushed to a small batch of users last year when it was still named ‘Your Offline Mix’, ultimately receiving praise from users and prompting Spotify to roll the feature out globally. Expect it to turn up on Android and iOS as soon as this week, as well as on Apple CarPlay and Android Auto.
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It’s worth mentioning that the feature is only intended for those subscribers willing to front the R65/m Premium fee every month. That makes sense, considering downloading music for offline playback has long since been a feature behind the Premium paywall, and that hasn’t changed here.
To ensure Offline Backup will work for you, head over to Settings, tap on ‘Data-saving and offline‘, and make sure ‘Offline access‘ or ‘Offline listening‘ are turned on. From there, you’ll be prompted with the auto-generated playlist when visiting the home page without an active internet connection. Users are also required to have listened to at least five songs ‘recently’ to work correctly, though Spotify doesn’t mention what the cut-off is.
