Listening to downloaded music while on WiFi with Spotify blocked

[Chootin]

Plan

Premium

Country

Australia

Device

Samsung Galaxy A31

Operating System

Android 11

My Question or Issue

I downloaded a library of music to listen to while I was away with no cellular access and only a WiFi with Spotify blocked. Whenever I attempted to load an album while connected to that WiFi, the album view would load indefinitely. The only way to resolve this was to disconnect from the WiFi, click through to the album, then reconnect to the WiFi (obviously an annoying solution if you're trying to do something else on the WiFi which requires a continuous connection). Has anyone else experienced this?

[Alex · Accepted solution]

Hey @Chootin,

Thanks for reaching out about this in the Community!

If Spotify is blocked on the WiFI network which you're talking about, the content on the app will most likely not load, as you're describing, even if it's downloaded to the phone.

The reason is that once Spotify detects a network connection, be it WiFi or mobile, it will try to load and stream the content from the network, rather than the app cache. Since the network is blocking Spotify, the songs won't load.

A way around this would be to switch on Offline Mode from the app settings. This way the app won't search for a network and will play the music you've downloaded to the device previously.

Hope this clears things up. Don't hesitate to reach out again if you have questions.

[Chootin]

Wait, does "it will try to load and stream the content from the network, rather than the app cache" mean that if a user downloads their favourite albums in a higher quality, Spotify will not actually be using that high quality audio unless they deliberately set themselves to offline mode? What a pain...

[Jeremy]

Hi there @Chootin,

Thank you for your reply.

The audio content is downloaded and in most cases will be played from the storage, but as a streaming app, the way to ensure it's completely offline is to enable offline mode as the name suggests. 

We hope that this shed some light to your questions.

Let us know if we can help you with anything else.

Take care!