How to find your downloaded music in Spotify
Spotifys latest update makes it difficult to find saved tunes
- By
- on June 13, 2019 4:09 pm
Perhaps Im in the minority, but I still download a lot of music from Spotify. Its really handy to have tunes stored locally on my phone for a multitude of reasons. I can listen without buying on-flight Wi-Fi, and every day during my commute on the NYC subway when the Wi-Fi and LTE signals inevitably cut out underground.
Having easy access to these downloaded songs and albums is important to me, but the latest Spotify update thats rolling out now [version 8.5.9.737 for Android and 8.5.7.601 for iOS] makes them harder to find for premium users.
The Your Library section of the app not only looks different, but Spotify has eliminated the Songs section, leaving just Playlists, Artists, and Albums. Dont worry, all your songs are still there. Theyve just been moved around a bit.
These instructions are the same whether you have the iOS or Android version of Spotify.
- To see your discography, tap Your Library on the bottom tray of options.
- To sort your music by albums that you have downloaded to your device, click the Albums tab, then swipe down to reveal a search bar. Next to that bar is a button that says Filters. Click that, then filter by Downloads.
- To find individual songs, which used to be conveniently nested within Your Library in a tab called Songs, youll now need to follow several steps. First, click the Playlists tab. Once youre there, go to the Liked Songs playlist, where all of your downloaded songs live. [All the songs that youve downloaded are automatically liked, so it makes some sort of sense that this is where theyd be found, but its still confusing.]
- Once youre in the Liked Songs playlist, click the menu button near the top right of the screen to reveal some settings. Click Filter downloaded songs to only show the songs you have downloaded. Even if you turn on Spotifys Offline mode in the app settings, youll still need to sort your music by downloads, otherwise it will display a bunch of unplayable songs.
- If you want, you can now hit Shuffle Play to randomize the songs that play.
Thats... a lot of steps just to be able to listen to the songs that you have saved locally on your phone so hopefully Spotify makes it a little easier to access in future versions.
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Comments
Interesting. Im on 8.5.7.601 on iOS and I still have the old format. Hopefully it takes a long time to get to me.
By Entegy on 06.13.19 4:17pm
I dont think any music app has solved the user interface problem.
By Cols714 on 06.13.19 4:24pm
All these updates and they still dont let users add more than 10000 songs to their libraries. How am I supposed to use their advanced music recommendations if they keep recommending too much content for me?
By P_Devil on 06.13.19 4:33pm
This drives me NUTS. I hate having to manage my library now only through playlists. There has got to be some major back end issue that prevents them from doing this.
By Abbott77 on 06.13.19 6:02pm
Some people think it has to do with their music recommendation system and some limit with that. Its strange that Apple, Amazon, YouTube Music/Google Music, and even Deezer can all still recommend music with libraries larger than 10,000 songs but Spotify, the most popular music service in the world, still hasnt caught up.
By P_Devil on 06.14.19 8:42am
They used to have a "downloads" category on the main library list on ios. I used it all the time while traveling and then suddenly it was gone with an update.
A little searching revealed that it was a beta feature not rolled out to all users and not likely to be brought back any time soon
By ShamblingCat on 06.13.19 4:48pm
Something restless Apple Music designers did that is also egregious is further bury genre search from the Browse section. Its not the end of the world to have to scroll more to do the inevitable drill-down in favored genres when new music you might want to listen to isnt seen on the main New Releases carousel, but it reeks of creeping Spotifycation in the companys desire to shape and narrow what you listen to in order to boost hot playlist and album numbers that they can then boast about in the press in record-setting terms. Thankfully the personal library stuff has not been altered, so if your definition of alternative is different than their definition of alternative, you can shuffle your faves, downloaded or not, in peace.
By lennon2017 on 06.13.19 6:21pm
Apple Music is far from perfect, but they at least handled the "Downloaded Music" problem very effectively in their UI.
By mobile_phoney on 06.14.19 12:41am
Oh, wow. The only way I use Spotify is by way of Songs and Recently Played. And guess what they did away with on this update?
Apple Music has never looked more tempting.
By armouring on 06.14.19 10:25am
Changes like this realllllly make me want to go back to Google Play Music.
By LukSwa on 06.18.19 3:33am