About 90% of the time I use Spotify on my mobile. However recently I just so happen to travel a lot in regions with a bad network. ‘No problem’ I thought, ‘Luckily there are Offline Playlists in Spotify’.
This worked quite well for a while, however I quickly ran out of space on my phone. Since I’m on iPhone I didn’t just get a new 64GB sdcard for 20 quid, no! I bought an iPod just as Steve Jobs would have wanted me to.
Anyway, so I decided to get all my playlists – and I have quite a few ones – offline. After a while however, syncing stopped and all I got was red exclamation marks next to my songs, indicating that they could not be saved offline.
After a bit of research I quickly found in the Spotify FAQ:
You can sync a maximum of 3,333 songs per device and stay offline for up to 30 days. (source)
Well this sucks balls. Some might point out that those 3,333 songs are about a week’s worth of music, but that’s not the point: If you are a music junkie and want to carry around your entire music collection (which you could on an iPod) than those 3,333 songs (or about 250 albums at an average of 13 songs per album) are just not enough.
Why on earth would they impose such a limit in the first place? Well, as one of the forum admins suggests:
The limit is down to the licensing agreements Spotify has with the record labels. (source).
Funny thing is that Rdio or Deezer do not have such limitations. Even if Spotify was the first in the game and go a worse deal then their followers, now would be a good time to re-negotiate some of the contract’s parameters.