Offline mode questions

[Christov]

I've just had my hard drive die on me with all my music on and the last backup was... well years ago. Long story short I'm considering a spotify subscription so I can actually have all the music I want without having to worry about this kind of thing. The library spotify has is already astounding and I'm basically sold on it already but I'm just trying to work out what the downside is to the offline mode?

As far as I can tell the offline mode lets you have up to 3,333 tracks in said mode which can be synced to up to 3 devices; even if this is across all 3 devices (which I guess it is?) that's still a huge amount of music to be able to play back without an internet connection. 

So my real puzzling question is this: If you have an offline mode, which you can enjoy hours of music with at a time, why would you ever buy music again?

I can't see a good reason to buy a track if I can just download it with my premium sub and listen to it whenever I want. Someone please correct me if I'm thinking about this in the wrong way!

Also on a side note: Can you chop and change offline playlists/albums? As in put some back 'online' so to speak?

I'm not limited to 3,333 forever and then once the cap is reached, that's it no more?

[licenced]

Pretty much correct. With Spotify Premium you can have up to 3333 tracks cached for offline listening on up to three devices.

As far as I am aware they do not need to be the same 3333 tracks on each device - so the absolute limit is actually 9999!.

The only restriction to this is that each device has to connect to the internet, and to Spotify servers, at least once per 30 days to confirm that you are still a customer and can keep listening.

There are several downsides to Spotify over a personal music collection, which may be more or less important to you depending on your views:

• Your collection is not physical - as long as you keep paying your £/$/€10 a month you're fine, but you do not own the tracks you download and cannot choose where and how to listen to them - it has to be through the Spotify software
• You are dependent on the Spotify service remaining live - if it goes down then so can your entire 'collection'
• Spotify is very reliant on the agreements it has with rights holders - if one of these wants to they can pull their collections. Some holders are also tricky when it comes to releasing new stuff on time and/or keeping it available (some pull it shortly after release in the vain hope you'll go buy it, but then put it back up after a few months)
• Your collection is only visible in Spotify - no more browsing through shelves or disk space to see what your catalogue contains

None of those points are big enough for me to have moved entirely from buying music to simply buying Spotify's license to listen to music (very different things), but it was pretty close. The disadvantages for me were more than outweighed by the fact that I am now spending much less on music than I was, yet getting to hear a much wider range of stuff ... and my savings go on tickets to see the bands I like play live.

D