How to Transfer a Spotify Playlist to Apple Music
Apple built this in, which changed the answer. What did not change is what fails to match.
Here's how to transfer a Spotify playlist to Apple Music: open the Apple Music app, find the option to transfer music from other services in its settings, sign in to Spotify on Spotify's own page when asked, and choose the playlists. The playlists are copied, not moved, and a few tracks usually fail to match.
Third-party services like SongShift and TuneMyMusic still exist and still work, and they are the fallback when the built-in route does not cover your case.
Neither gets you one hundred percent.
If some of what you are moving is your own music, the switch also changes which numbers you can watch. Apple Music does not print a public play count on track pages the way Spotify does; plays show up in the artist's own Apple Music for Artists figures. Apple Music plays add to that play total on a track you released, and nothing about them affects a playlist transfer.
The part worth understanding before you start is why a transfer is never exact, because it explains every missing track you are about to find.
A playlist is a list of pointers, not a list of files. Moving it means matching each pointer to a different catalog, and the two catalogs are not the same set.
When a track does not arrive, it is almost never a bug in the tool. It is that the recording you had does not exist on the other side under that name.
What does the built-in transfer actually do?
It reads your Spotify library with your permission and recreates the playlists inside Apple Music, matching each track to Apple's catalog.
For the number itself, Spotify saves can be ordered with the public link alone, never a password, and the price per 1,000 is shown before you pay.
You authorize it once through a Spotify login screen, which is Spotify's own page rather than Apple's form. Nothing about your Spotify account changes and nothing is deleted there.
The transfer is one way and it is a copy. Your Spotify playlists stay exactly where they were, which means you can run it, look at the result, and decide afterwards. If the real question is the service itself, is Apple Music better than Spotify compares price, sound quality and discovery side by side.
Why do some tracks not come across?
Four reasons cover nearly all of it, and only the last one is anybody's fault.
The recording is not in Apple's catalog at all. Independent releases, regional distribution deals and tracks pulled by a label leave real gaps, and no tool can match something that is not there.
The version differs. A live take, a remaster, a radio edit and an album cut are four separate recordings with the same title, and matching picks one of them.
The metadata is thin. A track credited to a compilation on one service and to the artist on the other is hard to line up automatically.
And occasionally the matcher simply gets it wrong, which is why it is worth scrolling the result rather than trusting the count.
When is a third-party service still the better route?
Three cases. If you are moving in the other direction, from Apple Music to Spotify, the built-in tool does not help you.
If you want to move a very large library and see a report of what failed, the dedicated services generally show you that list more clearly.
And if you are moving between services Apple does not support, a general-purpose tool is the only option. The same matching problem shows up in importing a Spotify playlist to SoundCloud, where the catalog gap is wider.
Whatever you use, it will ask for access to both accounts. That is unavoidable for the task and it is the step to think about rather than click through.
What happens to the playlist order and the duplicates?
Order is generally preserved. Duplicates are generally not removed, and if you run the transfer twice you will end up with two copies of the playlist rather than a merged one.
That is the most common way people make a mess of this: the first run looks incomplete, they run it again, and now they have two incomplete playlists instead of one.
If the first attempt came out wrong, delete the playlists on Apple Music before trying again; the songs stay in your library unless you remove them separately.
Moving Liked Songs, which is not a playlist
Spotify's Liked Songs looks like a playlist and behaves like one in the app, but it is a library list, and transfer tools do not always offer it next to your ordinary playlists.
The dependable workaround is to turn it into a playlist first. In the Spotify desktop app, open Liked Songs, click one track, select them all with Ctrl+A on Windows or Cmd+A on a Mac, and drag the selection onto a new playlist in the sidebar, or use the right-click menu to add them to a playlist. Then transfer that playlist like any other.
Do it on the desktop app rather than on a phone, where selecting hundreds of tracks at once is not practical.
The same trick tidies up a messy library before a move: build one playlist per mood or project, check the counts, and transfer those instead of a single list of everything. Smaller playlists also make it much easier to see which tracks failed to match, because a gap of three songs is visible in a list of forty and invisible in a list of four thousand.
Does transferring affect your Spotify account?
No. Reading a playlist does not modify it, and the permission you grant is a read permission.
Your Spotify listening history, your Wrapped, your followers and your own playlists all stay as they are. Apple's equivalent of Wrapped, Apple Music Replay, is built only from what you play in Apple Music, so it starts from your first listen there. If you cancel Spotify later, that is a separate decision with separate consequences, and the copy you made in Apple Music is not affected by it.
What does not transfer is anything social: playlist followers, collaborative editors and the follower count on a public playlist are Spotify-side objects and they stay there.
What about a playlist you published rather than one you keep?
This is a different situation and it deserves saying plainly, because the two get mixed up.
A playlist you curate for other people lives on whichever service its audience uses, and moving it means starting its follower count over from zero on the new side. The tracks copy; the audience does not.
If what you are moving is a published playlist rather than a personal one, that cold start is the real cost of the move, and it is larger than the handful of tracks that fail to match. How to get on Spotify playlists shows why a playlist audience is the slowest number to rebuild, and many curators keep the Spotify version alive for that reason.
For an artist moving their own releases onto Apple Music's side of things, the play total is the figure that starts from zero there. Plays on an Apple Music track add to it on a release you choose; they do not bring a playlist's followers along. The Spotify services that apply to the version you leave behind are on the Spotify page.
Questions people ask about moving a playlist to Apple Music
Is there a free way to transfer a Spotify playlist to Apple Music?
Yes. Apple's built-in import is free and is the first thing to try. Most third-party services also have a free tier that covers a limited number of tracks or playlists before asking for payment.
Will all my songs transfer?
Almost never all of them. Expect a small percentage to fail, mostly independent releases, live versions and tracks that are not licensed in Apple's catalog for your country.
Can I transfer from Apple Music back to Spotify?
Not with Apple's own tool, which only imports. For that direction you need a third-party service.
Does it move my liked songs too?
The built-in import handles playlists and library. Liked or saved songs are treated as a library rather than a playlist, and whether they come across depends on which option you choose during the import.
Is it safe to give a transfer app access to my accounts?
The authorization happens on Spotify's and Apple's own login pages, so neither service hands over your password. What you are granting is scoped access, and it can be revoked afterwards in each account's connected-apps settings. Revoking it when the transfer is done is worth the thirty seconds.
How long does the transfer take?
Minutes for a handful of playlists. A large library can take considerably longer, and the free tiers of third-party services usually throttle it.
Keep reading
- add plays to a track on Apple Music — If what you moved is your own release rather than someone else's playlist, the play total starts over on Apple Music's side, and you can add plays to a track on Apple Music to raise it.
- how a playlist gets an audience in the first place — The follower count is the one thing a transfer cannot carry with it, and how a playlist gets an audience in the first place covers why it is the slowest number to rebuild.
- what counts as a stream — Every service draws the line in its own place, and what counts as a stream explains why the same song reports different totals in different apps.