Offline listening is the feature that justifies a subscription for anyone who commutes, flies or lives with an unreliable connection. It is also the feature people misunderstand most, because Spotify's download model is a licence rather than a file you own, and the rules are stricter than the interface suggests.
The limits, exactly
- Five devices can hold downloads at once. Adding a sixth prompts you to remove one.
- 10,000 tracks per device, which is about 700 hours, or roughly a month of continuous listening.
- Podcast episodes do not count against the track limit and can be downloaded on the free tier too.
- Playlists can be set to auto-download, so new additions arrive without asking.
Those limits are per account, not per plan: Individual and Family both allow five devices. The difference is that Family gives each member their own five.
How to download on phone and desktop
On mobile, open an album, playlist or podcast and toggle Download. The green arrow appears next to each track as it completes. On desktop the same toggle exists in the context menu, and downloads land in a local cache folder — %LOCALAPPDATA%\Spotify\Storage on Windows, ~/Library/Application Support/Spotify/PersistentCache on macOS. Do not move or rename those folders; the app treats a missing cache as a corrupted download and starts again.
Offline mode is a separate switch in Settings. With it on, Spotify refuses to touch the network at all, which prevents the app from burning data on a weak signal while still trying to fetch artwork.
What downloads actually cost in storage
| Quality | Per track | Per 100 tracks | Per hour |
|---|---|---|---|
| Low (24 kbps) | ~1 MB | ~100 MB | ~11 MB |
| Normal (96 kbps) | ~4 MB | ~400 MB | ~43 MB |
| High (160 kbps) | ~7 MB | ~700 MB | ~72 MB |
| Very High (320 kbps) | ~14 MB | ~1.4 GB | ~144 MB |
| Lossless (24-bit FLAC) | ~45 MB | ~4.5 GB | ~450 MB |
A 64 GB phone with 8 GB free can hold a few hundred lossless tracks or a couple of thousand at Very High. Most people should download at Very High and keep lossless for the albums they sit and listen to. Our lossless guide covers the trade-off in more detail.
The 30-day licence check
A download is a cached, encrypted stream with an expiry. Spotify requires the app to go online roughly every 30 days to renew the licence, and if it cannot, the downloads stop playing until it does. This is the single most common "my downloads disappeared" complaint, and it is not a bug.
The fix is simple: open the app on Wi-Fi once a month. A one-minute connection is enough to refresh every licence on the device. If you are going away for longer than a month, connect on arrival at the other end rather than at the airport.
If a label pulls an album, the downloaded copy stops working immediately and shows as unavailable rather than deleting itself. No subscription tier prevents this, because the licence is between Spotify and the rights holder, not between you and Spotify.
Why a download queue stalls
In rough order of how often each one is the cause:
- Battery optimisation on Android. The OS freezes the app in the background and the queue pauses. Set Spotify to unrestricted, or keep the screen on until it finishes.
- Storage actually full. Spotify needs headroom beyond the download size for the cache; a nearly full phone silently fails.
- iOS background limits. Large queues only progress in the foreground. This is an OS rule, not something Spotify can change.
- A device limit already reached. The sixth device silently refuses new downloads until you remove one from the account page.
- Cache corruption. Reinstalling the app clears it, at the cost of re-downloading everything.
Offline Backup: the safety net
Offline Backup keeps a rolling cache of your recent listening and auto-downloads, so a dead zone does not mean silence even when you forgot to plan. It fills spare storage with the last few hundred tracks you played and drops the oldest as new ones arrive. Turn it on before a trip rather than during one, because it needs a connection to seed itself.
What cannot be downloaded
Live radio-style content, some podcast exclusives with rights restrictions, and anything you only have access to through a shared Jam session. Audiobooks download normally and count against the same device limit. Music downloads require Premium; podcast downloads do not, which is a useful loophole if you mainly listen to spoken word. See the free tier guide for the full split.
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