You could be forgiven for thinking that Spotify already allowed you to download music to your Apple Watch, but in fact, that feature had recently just arrived. The much-requested feature is useful for anyone who wants to go for a run without a phone swinging around in their pocket.
This feature, unsurprisingly, is limited to Spotify premium subscribers. It's why in our Spotify Free vs Premium piece, offline listening support was a major factor in our evaluation. Luckily, everyone can already control their Spotify playlist from their Watch, and that’s not changing, but being able to directly download music and podcasts from Spotify is new.
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Firstly, you’ll need to find the music you want to download. It might be easiest to make a playlist called “Watch” for music, say. You can download any playlist, album or podcast by pressing the three dots at the top of the screen and selecting “download to Apple Watch”.
You’ll see a green arrow next to songs or podcasts once tracks have been loaded on to the watch. You can also check on the download progress in the “downloads” section of the Watch app. While we haven’t been able to check yet, presumably switching selections out will be handled in the same way, as space is limited on the Apple Watch.
This functionality will work on any Apple Watch from the Series 3 on up. You’ll need to be running at least WatchOS 6. It’s also important to make sure you have the latest version of the app. In our experience, sometimes apps don’t auto-update perfectly on time, so you might want to check the app store.
Spotify also says it’s rolling the feature out to subscribers “over the coming weeks,” so if you don’t have it yet, you may have to wait a bit for it to appear. Until then, you can always break out your Sony Walkman and pop in your "Dookie" cassette tape by Green Day.
