These two friends built a simple tool to transfer playlists between Apple Music and Spotify, and it works great
Soundiiz is a free third-party tool that builds portability tools through existing APIs and acts as a translator between the services.
Last year, I had the unfortunate experience of losing all my playlists when I switched from Apple Music to Spotify. To me, playlists are important. They’re snapshots of a time in your life; maybe your summer of 2016 had a certain soundtrack to it. But, traditionally, music streaming services don’t make it easy to take playlists with you to other platforms.
So you can imagine how excited I was to see that Apple Music created a new playlist transfer tool through the Data Transfer Initiative (DTI), a group founded by Apple, Google, and Meta to create data portability tools. Europe’s Digital Markets Act requires these designated “gatekeepers” to fund transfer tools as part of a broader remedy to Big Tech’s strategy to lock users into their platforms.
Finally! Except there was one big problem. The tools don’t work with the world’s most popular music service, Spotify, which seemingly didn’t catch the data portability wave (or maybe a regulator isn’t telling them to). The DTI’s tool only transfers between Apple Music and YouTube Music, making it a lot less useful for most people.
The DTI’s executive director, Chris Riley, is fed up with Big Tech’s lock-in policies as well. He’s been trying to get more companies to come to the negotiating table and make their services more portable.
“We’ve kind of gotten baked into this world over the past decade of just feeling stuck,” said Riley in an interview with TechCrunch. “I don’t think enough people know this is something they should have.”
Acknowledging the DTI’s limitations, Riley suggested I transfer my playlists from Apple Music to Spotify using Soundiiz, a free third-party tool. Instead of working directly with streaming services, Soundiiz builds portability tools through existing APIs and acts as a translator between the services. Within minutes, I was able to link my accounts, transfer my playlists, and start listening to my old Apple Music playlists on Spotify. It was awesome and easy.
Soundiiz allows you to transfer playlists between Apple Music, Spotify, YouTube Music, Amazon Music, Tidal, Deezer, SoundCloud, and 20 other streaming services I’ve never even heard of. There’s a simple user interface to connect your streaming services and pick the playlists you want to transfer over, including ones that someone else has created.
Article