Streamin Audio Books on Spotify

This story applies to all streaming services, I guess, but my current one happens to be Spotify.

I had this nice series of books that I wanted to listen to. So I downloaded all three books for offline use and got started.

A couple of weeks later, I was just in cheater two of the third and last volume, the tracks began to jump: it played the first five seconds, then skipped to the next, so I was through the whole book in no time.

The downlods were correct though. So why?

After a while, the first few tracks began to show in gray. And even the tracks I had already successfully played would now skip after a few seconds. Wth?

I tried the same in the browser, where I could not play the book at all.

Contacting support was a mixed experience. They responded quickly, but the answers could have come from "IT Crowd": "Have you tried turning it off and on again?". In this case: uninstall and reinstall the Spotify app. To what avail, if it is failing in the browser too?

I send five message to support, asking specifically, whether the book had been deleted from Spotify, which resulted in all kinds of answers, just not to my question.

The last answer said they could not comment on albums that are removed. If I cannot play it in my region, it probably has been removed from that region. I wonder why such a "policy" exists? Being transparent about it would a beneficial for both sides.

Anyway, the learning is: if you have downloaded offline content that you plan to finish (such as books), turn off your network until you are finished. Otherwise, such "updates" can hit you hard. Of course, staying offline with your phone is not really an option - but you can use a firewall (if you are not on iOS) to keep the Spotify app from connecting to the server and start rendering your offline content useless.

I am not quite sure though, how long the app can stay offline without losing the "license".

I ended up buying the audio book, because I really wanted to get to the end of it.

And from now on, whenever I download a book to listen to later, I take the app off the internet until I am finished.