Offline playlists for music streaming are not a new innovation The best music streaming services allow you to select songs and save them locally for when your Internet connection goes down

The trouble is that this requires a bit of advance planning Once you go offline, you can't download any more, so you're stuck with either nothing or what you set up the last time you reviewed your offline playlist, which may be very out of sync with your current listening habits

This week, Spotify announced a genius update for Premium service subscribers that fixes this It's called “Offline Backup” and it takes the hassle out of planning your offline playlists During normal playback, the app will observe your listening habits and store a number of songs you've already streamed locally in an Offline Backup playlist, ready to go when you lose connection

Importantly, Spotify explains that this “evolves” over time “If you are looking for a particular mood, you can filter and sort the songs in your playlist by artist, mood, or even genre

This could be a lifesaver, for example, during a long road trip or when boarding an airplane and unexpectedly finding yourself without Internet

It doesn't take much effort, but there are a few things that need to be done to get offline backups to show up First, you need to make sure that “Offline Listening” is enabled You can find it under “Data Saving and Offline” in the “Settings” menu Second, Offline Backup is only enabled if you have at least 5 recently listened songs

If this is enabled and you have more than 5 songs playing, the playlist will automatically appear in your home feed as soon as you go offline

This is definitely a sensible feature Since you're going to be streaming the songs anyway, if storage isn't an issue, why not keep a copy on your phone just in case? Indeed, it is surprising that Netflix has taken so long to adopt this, considering that they have been allowing users to download their favorite movies and shows for offline viewing since 2021

Ultimately, however, it's not enough to make me reactivate my Spotify Premium account for two reasons

The first is that I had downloaded some of my favorite albums onto Apple Music for when I was out of signal range Admittedly, Apple Music does not automatically adapt to my current tastes, but as I get middle-aged anyway, my interest in exploring new music is waning

More importantly, however, Spotify can't compete with me in terms of value

I'm not a fan of Spotify because it bundles Apple Music, Apple Arcade, Apple TV, and iCloud storage into a simple $1995/month payment

I'm not particularly wedded to Apple Music as a service In fact, I have quite a few complaints about Apple Music, from the lack of Lastfm support and incomplete recommendation engine to the maddening habit of adding seemingly random album art to my library just because I like one song There are

But in general, Apple Music is “good enough” and I wouldn't argue with its value as part of the Apple One; I'm curious to see what Spotify Deluxe will offer, but for now I'm sticking with Apple Music