Spotify Adds a New Offline Backup Feature for Premium Users

Spotify Premium users no longer need to suffer in silence when they're offline and have forgotten to download tracks or playlists in advance. The streaming music company says it's adding an Offline Backup feature that'll automatically display a playlist of available tracks that can be played offline even if they weren't manually downloaded.

The feature will start rolling out this week on iOS and Android apps, and will work with Android Auto and Apple CarPlay, according to Spotify. The company noted that the feature might be useful for people who are boarding a flight with no internet connection and realize they haven't downloaded any music in advance. 

A Spotify representative didn't immediately respond to a request for comment.

Spotify says the playlist will be generated from tracks that are already in the user's data cache, so it presumably wouldn't take up additional storage space on a mobile device. The playlist will show up when a user is offline, and can be filtered and sorted by artist, mood and genre. The Offline Backup playlist changes over time, and can be added to the user's library for easy access.

Though the Offline Backup playlist hasn't shown up yet on the Spotify Home feed on my iOS device, an option in settings for "Offline listening" under Storage was enabled by default. Users have the option to remove downloads or clear their cache, but that could disrupt the playlist. In order for offline listening to work, Spotify said, users should've listened to at least five songs recently. 

Spotify didn't say in its announcement how many tracks Premium subscribers should expect to see in their Offline Backup playlist.