Now that Apple Music has added lossless audio to its entire catalog and is adding thousands of tracks in Dolby Atmos Music, you’ve decided you want to make the move from Spotify to Apple Music. But you’ve spent a lot of time creating playlists and marking songs and albums as your favorites. Will all that hard work be lost in translation? The good news is that there are several excellent tools, both free and paid, that can help to make the transition as painless as possible.
Getting started
One of the best things about this is that it doesn’t particularly matter if you’ve used Spotify for free or have been a Premium subscriber. Free Spotify users have always been able to create their own playlists; they just couldn’t manually select the songs they wanted to play. You’d have to shuffle them every time.
The only requirement to start this transfer process is to have a Spotify account with playlists you want to transfer. That’s it. These are playlists that you created yourself or other user-generated ones that you’ve followed. Playlists curated by Spotify, like Discover Weekly and others, may also appear as options to transfer, but that may not always be the case. Your mileage may vary.
The one other requirement from the Apple Music side is that you actually are subscribing to the service. It’s not enough to just have the app. You need to sign up and have a functioning subscription (trial periods are OK) to actually receive the playlists you’re looking to move over.
Also, because Spotify and Apple Music each have songs that may not be available between them, there is a chance you’ll lose out on some tracks or albums that Apple Music doesn’t have. The transfer methods below should make that clear when it comes time to push the button and make the actual switch.
Use an app from an iPhone or iPad
If you’re already using an iOS device and want to transfer things that way, there are apps for that. SongShift is probably the most prominent, and it’s fairly easy to manage. You can try it out as a guest instead of setting up an account, but it’s free to use unless you buy into a Pro account, which quickens the process and gives you other perks.
When you select the playlists, albums, or songs you want to move over, you will see everything that matches, as well as songs that don’t. You can try rematching those songs or ignore them so that they don’t transfer over the wrong song (which can happen). Under the free tier, transfer times are longer than under a Pro subscription, so keep that in mind.
Another iOS app doing the same thing is Switcheroo Transfer. It’s entirely free to use, though more limited in scope as far as the services it supports. The user interface is also more streamlined and basic. It enables you to sign in to your Spotify account, select the playlists you want, and move them over to Apple Music. Again, you will need an active Apple Music subscription to get this working, and you’re also limited to only transferring playlists. Albums and songs don’t appear on their own.
Switcheroo Transfer is also available on Android, but beware of the SongShift app for Android, which appears to be a shady imposter from a different developer.
Use a transfer service to get the job done
A bunch of these have popped up over the years, and they’ve gotten so much better in that time, making this process easier than ever. You can use these from a web browser or mobile app, and maybe even a desktop app for Windows, MacOS, and Linux. For the most part, they are broken down into free and paid tiers. Free tiers may limit you to transferring one playlist at a time, as opposed to paid plans that let you move entire libraries at the drop of a hat.
Free Your Music is like that. Pay $9.89 as a one-time fee and transfer over an unlimited number of songs, playlists, and albums. Pay for a premium or lifetime subscription, and you can do more, like keep playlists in the cloud, sync music between different services, and share them, too. That means you can switch from Spotify to Apple Music, yet keep the Spotify account active (if you choose to) and have both services stay in line with each other.
Soundiiz also keeps a fair bit of its better features behind a paywall. For example, the free tier lets you transfer Spotify playlists you created, but not any that Spotify curated. You’re also limited to transferring playlists one at a time, and only if there are 200 songs or fewer in each of those playlists. Pay $4.50 per month or $36 for a full year to lift those restrictions and have way more leeway over how to curate or prepare the content you’re switching over.
Tune My Music follows a similar path. The free tier limits you to 1,000 tracks and no option to sync anything in case you’re in a situation where you want to keep Spotify and Apple Music playlists equally active and in sync. Pay $4.50 per month or $24 for the year for unlimited conversions, plus up to 20 automatic syncs.
Shifting libraries
One thing to always keep in mind is that Spotify and Apple Music don’t share the exact same libraries, and that could make a big difference for unique content. For example, there may be live tracks, special studio remasters, or remixes that aren’t on both. For your average studio song or album, the odds are really high that they’ll match, so you don’t need to be as concerned about those. It’s the harder-to-find tracks that could pose a challenge. You may also run into a situation where the song name and artist are the same, but the version isn’t.
These transfer apps and services should tell you when that happens, but don’t be surprised if one falls through the cracks. If it does, you can always try rematching again later to fix it. But if not, you may need to add the proper track manually in Apple Music.
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