How to move your library and playlists from Spotify to Apple Music

There are plenty of reasons to want to use Apple Music as your subscription service of choice over Spotify. Perhaps recent controversies have you re-thinking where you want to send your money, or maybe you’re an Apple One subscriber and don’t want to pay for two music services. Perhaps the integration with Apple’s operating systems and services suits your life better. Or maybe you want your favorite artists to get paid more per stream, as Apple claims to do.

Whatever your reason, switching from Spotify to Apple Music is simple—just subscribe, log in, and stream away. Moving your content from Spotify to Apple Music is much more difficult! There’s no straightforward way to copy your playlists, saved music, likes and dislikes, or other data from Spotify.

Fortunately, there are services that can log into both your Spotify and Apple Music accounts and, more or less, get you up to speed. If you want to transfer music from Spotify to Apple Music, here are some services to consider.

FreeYourMusic

FreeYourMusic is a robust service that lets you transfer your saved music and playlists from one service to another (including Spotify and Apple Music), but it’s not cheap. The free version is limited to 100 tracks and one playlist. If you to transfer everything, you have to pony up $14.99 for the basic version.

There’s a subscription that adds features like auto-syncing of playlists and albums between services (if you intend to keep using multiple services), and the ability to back up your playlists to the cloud. It starts at $4.17 a month, but that’s only if you pay for a $49.99 annual subscription. You can pay $19.99 a quarter ($6.66 a month) if you prefer, but there’s no month-to-month option.

One nice thing about FreeYourMusic is the robust desktop support, including macOS (Intel or Apple silicon!) and even Linux.

FreeYourMusic is costly, but it has broad platform support, including desktop apps.IDG

Song Shift

A more affordable solution, available only on iPhone, is Song Shift. The free version lets you move one album or playlist at a time, the Pro subscription ($4.99 a month, $19.99 a year, $39.99 lifetime) will quickly match lots of songs.

It’s a little more involved than FreeYourMusic. Because the exact same tracks are not always available from the exact same source albums, you’re asked to review your matches and correct any potential mismatches or missing tracks.

On the other hand, it’s nice to get ahead of any of these problems as it goes, instead of a one-button “set it and forget it” that might give you mis-matched playlists. It’s more limited than FreeYourMusic in some ways, and more time-consuming, but more affordable and delivers better end results.

Song Shift is only on iPhone and requires a bit more manual effort, but it works well and delivers good results.IDG

Soundiiz

Don’t want to download an app? Soundiiz is a web-based solution. The free version will only transfer one playlist at a time and won’t transfer your collection. The Premium subscription is $4.50 a month or $36 a year, and will sync your whole collection at once. You can even do stuff like merge and split playlists.

Caveats and things to know

Of course, none of these platforms want you to easily switch to a competitor, so they don’t make it easy. That means these third-party services can only go so far, and they often run into problems that require updates or a little manual correction.

Here are some of the caveats to be aware of if you’re deciding to switch:

Most services have a free tier but you’re not likely to be happy with it. They’re almost always limited to the point where really transferring your library and playlists would be a huge hassle. Be prepared to pay.Spotify has a lot of public user-made playlists you can subscribe to, and collaborative playlists. Some services won’t transfer those, or only will do so if you’re a collaborator with editing privelages.The dynamic Spotify playlists (Daily Drive, Discover Weekly, Daily Mix, etc.) are almost certainly not going to be moved over (and if so, they’ll be static playlists). However, Apple has its own personalized playlists based on its own data about your played and liked tracks.Spotify does Podcasts, but Apple Music does not. Apple’s Podcasts app is its own thing. You’ll probably have to re-subscribe to whatever podcasts you enjoy using that app, and spend a little time marking episodes played to catch up. Or you can keep your free account (minus Joe Rogan, of course).