Ten years ago, leaving a streaming service meant rebuilding your library by hand. Now it takes about four minutes and often costs nothing, because the services themselves built the tools.
Which is a slightly funny outcome when you think about it. Apple built a feature to import from Spotify. Spotify built a feature to import from Apple. Everyone wants to make arriving easy and leaving invisible. But it works in your favour, since the arriving tool is the one you need.
Here’s how to do it properly, what will silently go missing, and how to catch what does.
First: nothing gets deleted
Transferring copies. Your Spotify playlists stay exactly where they are, untouched, regardless of which method you use or how badly it goes.
That’s worth internalising because it changes the strategy. You can run a transfer, look at the result, decide it’s a mess, delete the destination playlists, and try again with a different tool. Nothing is at stake on the Spotify side. I’d take advantage of that and test with one playlist before committing your whole library.
Don’t cancel Spotify until the new library is verified. Run both for a couple of weeks. The overlap costs one month of subscription and saves you from discovering in March that half your running playlist didn’t make it.
Start with the destination’s own tool
The built-in options are free, unlimited, and better matched to their own catalog than anything third-party. Check these before you pay anyone.
Apple Music
Apple’s transfer tool is the strongest of the bunch. It launched in Australia and New Zealand in May 2025, reached the US and a handful of other countries that August, and by September 2025 covered nearly every country where Apple Music operates, excluding mainland China, Myanmar, and Russia. It’s powered by SongShift under the hood, which Apple partnered with rather than building from scratch.
On iPhone or iPad: Settings → Apps → Music → Transfer Music from Other Music Services. Pick Spotify, sign in, choose what to move.
The same option lives inside the Apple Music app on Android. If you don’t see it anywhere, go to music.apple.com in a browser, click your profile picture, and choose Transfer Music.
It handles playlists, saved albums, and liked songs. Unmatched tracks get flagged for review, and you have about 30 days to go through the list and pick alternatives.
YouTube Music
YouTube Music Premium subscribers can import playlists from other services, including Spotify. If you’re already paying for YouTube Premium, this is the cheapest path since it’s included.
Non-Premium users need a third-party tool.
Spotify (going the other direction)
Worth knowing if you’re comparing services or moving to Spotify. In November 2025 Spotify added an import feature powered by TuneMyMusic. Open the mobile app, go to Your Library, scroll to the bottom, tap Import your music. It supports Amazon Music, Apple Music, Deezer, Pandora, SoundCloud, Tidal, YouTube Music and others, with no cap on playlist count or size.
It’s inbound only. There’s no matching export button, which is entirely predictable and also the reason this article exists.
Tidal, Deezer, Amazon Music, Qobuz
None of these have a comparable native importer as of mid-2026. Deezer has had various flavours of one over the years but it’s been unreliable. Assume you’ll need a third-party tool for these.
Third-party transfer tools
When the destination has no importer, or when you want more control over matching, these are the established options. All of them work through official APIs with your permission, which is why they’re legitimate in a way that DRM-stripping software isn’t.
Soundiiz covers the widest range of platforms and gives you the most control before committing. It’ll also export to CSV and XML, and it has a CSV-to-Spotify import. Free tier: 200 tracks per playlist. Sync slots are limited by plan, with one on free and 20 on premium. Around €39/year. Reviewers consistently praise the completeness and consistently complain that the free tier limits aren’t obvious until you hit them mid-transfer.
TuneMyMusic is the simplest and, in most head-to-head tests, the fastest. Three steps: connect source, connect destination, transfer. Free tier: 500 tracks total. About $5.50 monthly or $2/month billed annually. It’s also the engine behind Spotify’s own import feature, which says something about its reliability.
FreeYourMusic has the most generous free allowance at 600 tracks, native apps across Windows, macOS, Linux, iOS and Android, and auto-sync at 15-minute intervals without slot limits. €39/year, or €199.99 once for a lifetime licence. That lifetime price only makes sense if you migrate constantly.
SongShift is iOS-only and free for basic use. Since it powers Apple’s official tool, it’s a sensible choice for anything Apple-adjacent.
For a one-time migration, my honest advice: use the destination’s built-in tool if it exists. If it doesn’t, pick whichever paid tool covers your library size, subscribe for a single month, move everything, then cancel. There’s no reason to hold an ongoing subscription to a tool whose job is finished.
How matching works, and why songs go missing
This is the part that determines whether you’re happy with the result, so it’s worth understanding rather than just clicking through.
Every commercial recording has an ISRC, a unique code identifying that specific recording. Not the song, the recording. The album version, the radio edit, the 2011 remaster, the live take from Glastonbury, and the acoustic version each carry a different ISRC. Good transfer tools match on ISRC first, then fall back to comparing title, artist, album, and duration when the code isn’t available on both sides.
Tools that match on title and artist alone produce noticeably worse results, especially on large libraries and on non-English music where transliteration varies between platforms.
Songs fail to transfer for reasons that fall into a few buckets:
The track genuinely isn’t there. Licensing differs by platform and by country. An artist’s catalog might be on Spotify but not Tidal in your region. No tool can conjure a track that the destination doesn’t carry.
The recording exists under a different version. The song is there but it’s the deluxe edition, or a remaster with a new ISRC, or a regional release with a slightly different title. This one’s fixable by hand.
Metadata disagrees. Featured artists formatted differently, remix credits in the title on one platform and the artist field on the other, punctuation variations. Cross-catalog metadata is messier than you’d hope.
Label changes. When an artist moves labels, the old recording sometimes gets pulled and re-uploaded with a fresh ISRC that hasn’t propagated everywhere yet.
Local files. Anything you added from your own drive isn’t in Spotify’s catalog and can’t be read by any transfer tool. You’ll need to add those to the new service yourself, which usually means uploading them.
Expect somewhere between 1% and 10% of a typical library not to match cleanly. Higher if you listen to a lot of independent, regional, or older catalog music. Lower if you’re mostly on the charts.
The actual process
Tidy up first. You almost certainly have playlists you’ll never open again. Deleting them before you migrate means less to verify afterwards and fewer tracks against a free-tier cap. Ten minutes here saves more later.
Export a reference copy. Run Exportify or your tool’s CSV export on the Spotify side before you start. Free, quick, and it gives you a definitive record to compare against. Without it you’re taking the transfer tool’s word for what it did.
Move one playlist first. Something mid-sized, 50 to 100 tracks, ideally with a mix of mainstream and obscure. Then open it on the destination and actually listen to a few. Check you got album versions rather than live recordings, and that the order held.
Then do the rest, in batches. Large transfers can time out or freeze partway through, and every cloud-based tool has this problem. Batches of 300 to 400 songs are more reliable than one enormous job. Slower, but you won’t have to restart.
Move the non-playlist stuff too. Liked Songs, saved albums, followed artists. These are separate options in most tools and they’re often left unticked by default. For a lot of people Liked Songs is the most important list on the account, and it’s the easiest one to forget because it doesn’t look like a playlist.
Handle the unmatched list immediately. Every decent tool produces a report of what didn’t make it. TuneMyMusic offers a downloadable CSV of missing songs. Work through it while the context is fresh, because a month later you’ll have no idea what “The Cure – Pictures of You” was supposed to be sitting next to. Search each missing track directly on the destination; a decent share of them are there under a slightly different version name.
Re-download for offline. New service, new offline library. Do this before your commute, not during it.
What will never transfer
Some things are structurally impossible to move, and knowing that in advance is better than discovering it.
Listening history. Years of play counts don’t come with you. This is the real cost of switching, because it’s what feeds recommendations. Expect the new service’s suggestions to be mediocre for a month or two while it learns you.
Algorithmic playlists. Discover Weekly, Release Radar, daily mixes. These are generated, not stored. If there’s one you love, copy its tracks into a normal playlist before you go.
Wrapped. Your Spotify Wrapped history stays with Spotify. Screenshot anything sentimental.
Playlist folders. Spotify’s API doesn’t expose folder structure, so nothing can read it. If you’ve organised carefully, take a screenshot and rebuild by hand.
Collaborative status. The songs move. The collaboration is a platform feature and doesn’t survive.
Followers on your playlists. Start again from zero. If you’ve built a following on a public playlist, that’s a genuine reason to keep the Spotify account alive even after you stop using it daily.
Playlist cover art and descriptions. Sometimes carried, usually not. Depends on the tool and the destination.
Podcasts. Some transfer, many don’t, and exclusives obviously can’t. Podcast apps handle subscriptions better than music services do anyway.
Should you actually switch?
A few practical things that get lost in the feature comparisons.
Apple Music has the strongest lossless and spatial audio offering and includes it at no extra charge, and its transfer tool is the best. It’s also deeply tied to Apple’s ecosystem, which is either the point or the problem depending on your devices.
YouTube Music’s catalog is genuinely enormous because it includes user uploads, live sessions, and remixes that never got a commercial release. The flip side is a catalog with a lot of junk in it and a recommendation engine entangled with your YouTube history.
Tidal appeals on audio quality and artist payouts. Smaller catalog, higher price.
Deezer and Amazon Music both undercut on price. Amazon’s is a strong deal if you already have Prime.
Spotify’s actual advantage, and the reason people come back, is the recommendation engine and the social layer. If you switch primarily for audio quality, you’ll get it. If you switch and then miss discovery, that’s the thing you gave up.
One quiet option worth mentioning: you don’t have to close the Spotify account. Downgrading to free keeps your playlists, your followers, and your history sitting there indefinitely at no cost, which makes coming back trivial if the new service disappoints. Free tier keeps everything except offline downloads and the ad-free experience.
After the move
Give it a week, then do a proper audit. Pull a CSV from the new service if it supports one, compare against your Spotify export, and see what the gap actually is. Roughly a fifth of people only notice missing tracks a month or more later, at which point reconstructing what was there is guesswork.
If more than about 10% of a playlist failed, don’t fix it song by song. Delete the destination playlist and run it again through a different tool. Re-running takes minutes; manual repair of 200 tracks takes an evening.
And keep your export files. Whatever service you’re on now, you’ll probably move again eventually, and a clean CSV of everything you’ve ever liked is the one asset in this whole arrangement that belongs to you rather than to a platform.
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