How we listen to music is always changing. As the leading music streaming service, Spotify has introduced a lot of quality-of-life improvements over the last four years, and now they are releasing another feature – Offline Backup. This new kind of playlist promises to change how we choose music in an increasingly online world.
Improving Online Services
Spotify has been going through a period of transformation, as it looks to broaden the content it offers while improving the listening experience for its core audience of music lovers. It’s a classic scaling strategy that is used by a lot of online services – attract more customers by diversifying the content it offers. This strategy is best exemplified by iGaming sites and the games they provide for users. These services typically start with the ability to play bingo at Paddy’s, then they expand with slots, spinning wheels and jackpot games to gather a larger audience. In Spotify’s case, they have moved into podcasting and audiobooks, to corner the market for audible entertainment.
However, Spotify has been careful to avoid neglecting its core appeal – music streaming. While it has welcomed book lovers and even introduced a special Audiobook Access Tier for them, they have been steadily upgrading the music part of their service. This was helped by generative AI in particular, as it facilitated sweeping changes in how a lot of tech companies operate. For example, Google introduced an AI overview for search that neatly answers your question without any clicks. For Spotify, it allowed them to develop special tools that automate how users organise and categorise their music libraries.
Using Online Services Offline
In most cases, using an online service offline means downloading the content. See Amazon’s Kindle and Audible services, where users can download both e-books and audiobooks for seamless listening without needing to rely on the internet. It works well for those services but, as streaming services continue to reign in the entertainment industry, downloading everything is a very tall ask.
Spotify also gives users the option to download songs so they play offline, but now the Offline Backup feature uses caching to bypass this. It tracks your listening habits, so long as you’ve listened to at least five songs recently. Then it uses the recently cached data to make a playlist that still works even if your internet doesn’t.
It includes other features, like the inclusion of downloaded songs and a sorting feature, so users can seek out specific artists, genres or moods. However, much like the option to download songs, the Offline Backup is only available to paying subscribers, not Spotify’s 400+ million monthly active users who listen for free with ads. This means the lion’s share of Spotify users won’t experience this feature unless it gets expanded to them in the future.
Using cached data may be a quick and easy solution, but it highlights a vulnerability with most streaming services. The cache solution may work for music streaming and cut down on data inefficiency for the host device, but the same can’t be said for more mainstream services. According to data from Forbes, 99% of US households are subscribed to video-on-demand streaming services like Netflix, Amazon Prime Video or Apple TV+. Each one allows users to download entertainment beforehand, but it’s data-intensive and doesn’t serve as a backup for sudden internet outages.
With Offline Backup, music listeners have a unique way of staying connected to their favourite songs, one that hasn’t been replicated by any other markets yet. Now that Spotify has shown how cache data can be used to beat a poor internet connection, we can expect other services like YouTube Music or Apple Music to experiment with their own offline modes.
