I recently posted about the best music streaming service for different kinds of people, and it made me realize that the reason I stick with Spotify isn’t because it’s the best or I love it so much. It’s because I have a playlist consisting of 1,823 songs I’ve “liked” over the past five years or so, and I could never recreate it.
Since all the major streaming services do about the same thing for about the same price, I’m sure they count on keeping users by making it mildly frustrating for you to switch. This, I assume, is why they don’t build a “take this playlist elsewhere” feature into their apps. But there’s a way around it. You have to use a third party app or website, but it’s easy and free.
Apps that transfer playlists and music from Spotify to Apple Music (and other services too)
There are a number of apps designed to transfer your playlists, album lists, and song choices between various music services. Here are three:
There are also web-based options, like:
How to transfer your music from one service to another
Like the music services that spawned them, these single-purpose apps and websites are all basically the same. They’re either free, or free with a pay-for-it option for premium features. But I doubt you’ll need these.
Whether you choose a web-based option or a dedicated app, you basically download the app/visit the site, then you log in to your Spotify, Apple Music, or whatever other service you have (SongShift, for instance, supports 12 music streaming services.) From there, you give permission to the apps to access your information, and follow the prompts to transfer your playlists, albums, and whatever else you want between music streaming apps.
These services work by accessing the text and metadata from the playlists on one music service and recreating them on another. Once this is finished, you’ll probably want to go into your music app’s settings and remove the permission from the transfer app, for security’s sake.
Most of the time, the transfer is a painless process, but there might be mistakes or artists/songs that aren’t available in both places. Most of these apps will let you know if something didn’t make the jump, and/or give you a chance to replace songs manually.
There might be platform-specific lists that won’t transfer if the new service has no equivalent. For instance: Spotify plays podcasts, but Apple Music does not, so you obviously can’t transfer podcasts between these platforms. You could, however, transfer podcasts between Amazon Music Unlimited and Spotify.