Here’s how to transfer your playlists to Apple Music from other platforms

So you are tired of Spotify and its drawbacks and have chosen Apple Music to stream all your favorite songs. Congratulations! But this probably isn’t your first music streaming service and chances are you have playlists and albums that you’ve saved over the years. Lucky for you, Apple Music makes it pretty easy to transfer your library from your old streamers.

Wherever you access Apple Music – whether Android, iOS, macOS, Windows, or the web – click or tap your account profile picture, then look for an option that includes the words “Transfer Music.” A quick stream of the SongShift transfer service initiates and you can import content from Amazon Music, Deezer, Spotify, Tidal, and YouTube Music. Select a service, sign in to your account, approve permissions for SongShift, then select the playlists you want to keep. SongShift can also let you import albums that have been saved to certain accounts, but on an all-or-nothing basis.

After selecting “Import”, you may see a message that some music needs to be reviewed. Click “Review Now” to sift through songs that Apple Music was unable to import for one reason or another. Apple Music may not have the rights to some of the songs on the review list, although it may suggest alternative tracks for a few. You can accept or ignore the alternatives – click “Ignore All” if you wish – then click “Save” to complete the import.

SongShift also offers its services independently of Apple Music through its own iOS app, supporting a wider variety of streamers including Audiomack, Deezer, Pandora, Qobuz and several others. It’s still free, but in addition to library imports, you can also share platform-independent playlists with your friends or even sync song uploads across platforms if you absolutely must use multiple platforms.

TuneMyMusic offers a web interface that lets you move playlists across 19 services via connections, but you can also just manually enter the title and artists of the songs you want. You can import a text file with a list you’ve already entered, or link to a URL containing a stored list.

Maybe you have a YouTube Music account and prefer to avoid middlemen in the export process? Google Takeout will allow you to export your YouTube Music playlists to your device and Apple Music can grab that file and do its magic by importing and reconciling the songs. Hell, if you’re moving all your files from Google to Apple, you might want to see how to use Google Takeout to transfer your Google Photos library to iCloud.