There often comes a time when you’re looking to switch music providers. Whether it’s because you’ve discovered one has features you really want, or you want to take advantage of a promotional offer.
The only problem is no one wants to spend time recreating all of their curated and saved playlists, but the good news is you can take them with you, you just have to use an app to transfer them.
If you’re looking to switch from Apple Music to Spotify – for example – you can do. Watch the video above to find out how, or follow our written guide underneath if that’s easier:
Get SongShift and link your accounts
- Download SongShift for iPhone
- Open the app
- Select your sources (in this case: Apple Music and Spotify)
- Sign in to Apple Music and Spotify to link music
- Allow access to libraries where required to do so
The easiest transfer method involves an app called SongShift. It’s available for free on the App Store for iPhone, so be sure to download it. There are similar apps on the Play Store for Android too, like ‘FreeYourmusic‘ as one example. While it is free, SongShift does limit how much you can transfer without paying, so also offers a ‘Pro’ subscription which you can pay for monthly, annually or just pay one up-front fee that covers you forever.
Your first step after downloading SongShift is to open the app and to set up your music services. It supports a lot of different services, including Tidal, YouTube Music and Pandora. For the purpose of this tutorial, we’re choosing Apple Music and Spotify. Each of them will require you to allow certain permissions and sign into the accounts.
Transfer your playlists
- Tap the ‘+’ to start a new transfer
- Select Apple Music playlists as your source
- On the next screen toggle ‘Multiple Playlists’ on
- Now select all the playlists you want to transfer
- Hit ‘Done’
- Choose Spotify and ‘New Playlist’ as your destination
- Hit ‘Continue’
- Tap ‘I’m Finished’
- Wait for processing to finish and confirm any matches
Once you’ve linked your sources you tap the ‘+’ icon at the top to start a new Shift, then choose your Source. For this guide, that’s Apple Music. Tap ‘Playlists’, and then you can do one at a time, or you can toggle on the multiple playlist switch.
The next step is to choose which playlists to transfer. It’s worth noting, with our Apple Music some of them showed as having 0 songs, but once we selected them to transfer it discovered all the songs, matched them and processed them.
Depending on how many playlists you have, it could take a little time to match and generate your new playlists, but once it’s done the matching you’ll find it often can’t find a couple of songs and you can either choose to ignore the match or try and find it manually instead. Otherwise, the service works really well.
The only playlist we found it failed on was one of the largest with nearly 1,000 songs in it. It seemed to give up after 500 songs.
Of course, if you want to do it the other way and move music from Spotify to Apple you can do. It’s the same process, but you choose Spotify as the source and Apple as the destination.