Offline Spotify

Andres, you rock! ( Delete or Edit)

Um, did they? I am not aware of such a function ever existing in Spotify. As far as I know, it has always been a solely streaming service. ( Delete or Edit)

It was demonstrated in a Youtube video. It's supposed to be one of the functions in the iPhone client. I have no idea if this will be added to Android. ( Delete or Edit)

Well It will play the whole song if you have it cached and you disconnect from the Internet, so I'm guessing it checks with the spotify server or something before starting to play... so all they need to do is remove these checks for cached songs when its offline. ( Delete or Edit)

Well, if the ads are also played offline, the business model should still be valid I guess. ( Delete or Edit)

There would be no way of spotify monitoring the add listens/views though so wouldn't get revenue from it! ( Delete or Edit)

The point in this is to be able to play music even when the user don't have Internet access. Of course you would play online if you had the opportunity, how would you else be able to add music or update your cache? If the cache is limited, they could force people to get online now and then. The most users would probably always stay online though, just as they do now. ( Delete or Edit)

I agree, how much would they let users cache anyway? To make it viable they'd have to maybe limit it to an hour, but who's so desperate for music that they can't go for an hour offline without it? ( Delete or Edit)

There has to come a point where you draw the line between what features you miss out on and bandwidth you can save, to what people can rip from spotify.

The most intelligent of people out there already know how to rip songs from spotify. Its a very easy process, But your saying you cannot have offline content because of fears that people will rip the music from spotify.. well thats a poor answer if you ask me. the bottom line of having Offline content will be to decrease bandwidth on spotify servers (Very dramatically)... therfore giving people a better experience as they do not have to keep downloading the same track over and over again. we live in a day and age where nothing is safe... and even players like the iplayer from BBC or youttube content can be ripped. but still they offer offline content as they know this saves server/bandwidth time.

For the spotify team to say this would put an end to streaming controlled advertisement music is poor.

if its possible to cache and play offline music files, its also possible to play offline cached adverts..... but always remember that its not about somebody playing music continually offline, its about saving bandwidth and server time... so that person would probably still be online while playing there offline/cached music tracks.

If advertising is the problem, make cached music files only available for 1 week, therefore you must be online to recieve new adverts. once new adverts are downloaded, they can be placed inbetween the cached tracks again... thus making the offline/cached music files available for another week.

the actual cache of the music files can be encrypted so that only spotify can decrypt them to play them... thus making it harder for people to rip... but again.. always bear in mind that people can rip songs from spotify now... so what are you losing???

Look forward to any responses!! ( Delete or Edit)

There are already services that has the possibility to synchronize playlists to mp3 players in USA. They are premium services and the songs are only playable for a month after you last synchronized.
Personaly I would be prepared to pay maybe 50% more than Spotify premium for such a service and hopefully the music industry understands that that kind of service is what the consumers want, they want content not round plastic disks. ( Delete or Edit)

Exactly! And if the client doesn't reconnect for (say) 7 days, then it will no longer work until it does (so ensuring ad-data DOES get uploaded) ( Delete or Edit)

Couldn't you run the vpn client in a guest OS with something like vmware?
This would leave you connexion of the main (host) OS unchanged for Spotify, wouldn't it? ( Delete or Edit)

probably so if the comp wasn't a piece of crap that slows down to a crawl with a virtual machine running ( Delete or Edit)

or you just save the whole cache in a single encoded binary file instead of separate files for each track... ( Delete or Edit)

I like this idea. Makes Premium membership even more worth getting. ( Delete or Edit)

The ad caching simply isnt "doable" in this kind of situation.
Premium would be the only way to do it. You can already roam with a Premium account, its just a question of enabling cache playing, with some kind of authentication algorithm offline. ( Delete or Edit)

Greetings, i currently live in Norway.From my view if you wish to use music, then you have to pay severely much for it. Purchase a mobilt bredbånds subscription for 500 NOK and you'll be getting free internet with a 5GB data cap each month and all the music you wish to listen to. Unfortunatly data plans are expensive in Norway. ( Delete or Edit)

Spotify already caches content. It's just a matter of surpassing the login and geolocation parts. Because premium users can roam freely, only a local authentication is needed.
About the delays, yes. Even the quality seems a bit worse. I suspect they are measuring the connection speed. ( Delete or Edit)

Really good point. I agree. ( Delete or Edit)