Does Spotify prioritise downloaded tracks over streaming? Is there a way to change this?

[Loopy_Noopy]

Plan

Premium

Country

England

Device

PC

Operating System

Windows 10

My Question or Issue

I've been using Spotify a lot on my home computer now, and I've noticed that the quality of the songs playing vary greatly when playing music. The best way I can describe it is on moment there is bass, then the next there isn't.

I have all the playlists I listen to downloaded (I have the stream quality at very high, cannot find an option to set the download quality) but this doesn't seem to fix my issue.

I'm chalking this up to my internet being horrible, and I haven't got the bandwidth to stream songs and work. Which, in my opinion should be mute if I have the songs downloaded. I would assume Spotify would prioritise the downloaded tracks rather than streaming them if they're there. So I would like to confirm:

1. Does Spotify prefer to stream tracks over downloaded songs?
2. If the answer to question 1 is yes, can we have a toggle in the settings to make Spotify prefer downloaded songs
3. Is there a way to set Spotify to offline mode on PC? (Working on a tower, not exactly mobile)
4. If the answer to 3 is no, should I just delete the downloaded songs at it seems to have no effect?

[Mihail]

Hey @Loopy_Noopy,

Thanks posting here in the Community! We'll gladly shed some light on the situation.

When you play a downloaded track with an active internet connection, the app does indeed connect to our servers and stream the content. This is because there is a check running if the version you've downloaded is synched up properly with the most up to date one at our end.

But not to worry, this can easily be avoided by setting the app in offline mode. This Support Article contains a useful guide on how to do this. Once activated, the app will only play the downloaded version and won't take up any of your bandwidth 🙂

Hope this helps. Keep us posted if you have any questions.