My kids love Spotify and I agree to keep a membership going for them. I could use it too Spotify and via its offline mode for RAGBRAI and other events where my devices don’t have wireless coverage, but I’m old school and prefer downloaded music files that I can see.

My kids offer me Playlists via weblinks so I can access the music via a web browser and many of these songs are also freely available on YouTube. Using a couple simple Terminal commands, these songs will get downloaded as lower quality formats (128 kbps) and my ears can’t tell the difference.

pip install spotdl

spotdl [insert Spotify playlist URL here]

Notes:

I had to use sudo before the first command, hopefully this is just my Mac and not applicable to yours.

For the Spotify playlist URL, just insert the link and don’t include the brackets as shown above. Get the URL through a web browser by logging into your account at spotify.com or use the URL to the playlist that your Spotify using friend gave to you.

You may need to install ffmpeg, consider brew for installing it. If additional ffmpeg errors persist, they may be originate from spotdl’s config file and its bitrate described here.

Within .spotdl and Terminal, I made a “music” folder with the command mkdir music, and then executed the spotdl command from there.