Spotify Announces Testing Offline Mix Playlist, May Compete With YouTube in Coming Days

Spotify CEO Daniel Ek announced that the app is officially testing an offline playlist dictated by the users' recently played favourites. The company first spoke about an offline mix playlist in 2020 but nothing tangible came of it immediately. But it is clear now that the development was in the works behind the screen and it is finally coming to fruition now. Several users claimed on social media to already have access to the feature. It is still unclear whether the Spotify offline mix feature will be free for users or will be a Premium access feature.

Ek tweeted the announcement, where he wrote that Spotify was "testing out a new feature called "Your Offline Mix" — a playlist designed for those times when you might not be online." A screengrab shared alongside the tweet showed the test feature with a playlist worth multiple hours worth of music.

The application currently allows users to manually download playlists for offline playback. But the "offline mix" feature will draw music from the users' recently played favourite music while still online, with no manual intervention required for the playlist creation.

Spotify, with over 500 million worldwide users, is competing against Google-owned YouTube Music, which already flaunts an “Offline mixtape” feature. With the "Smart download” option turned on, the YouTube app allows users to automatically download up to 500 songs in different playlists.

Recently, Spotify also removed several songs published by AI music company, Boomy, which was putting up computer-generated music, and impersonating artists without any license or consent. Universal Music contacted Spotify, noting that AI bots could have been used to increase the number of listeners to Boomy's songs, potentially bringing in a lot of money for the uploaders of the duplicated content.