Apple Music now lets you import libraries and playlists from Spotify and other competing services. However, the feature is currently limited to Australia and New Zealand.
The new playlist migration feature was introduced on May 12th, according to an Apple Support document uncovered by MacRumors. It can be accessed from the web-based version of Apple Music, the Apple Music for Android app, or through the Settings app on iPhone and iPad (go to “Apps” and navigate to “Music” in Settings).
Curiously, Apple did not build this feature in-house. It instead chose to partner with SongShift, a third-party service that transfers and syncs playlists between a variety of music streaming platforms. It’s hard to match albums and songs across different streaming platforms, so the partnership does seem like a reasonable path forward. After all, SongShift has been around for a while; it already has the data needed to make accurate matches, and Apple can piggyback off of the service’s manual review process, which lets you fix unmatched or incorrectly matched tracks up to 30 days after initiating a playlist transfer.
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I should clarify that Apple will only allow you to import data from other services—you can’t export your Apple Music playlists to Spotify or other rival platforms. This omission is somewhat frustrating, as it’s clearly an example of lock-in, and it restricts customers’ ability to share playlists with people outside of Apple Music—one of the best things about SongShift, as a standalone service, is that it lets you curate and sync playlists across multiple platforms. (Apple Music will delete your playlists if you unsubscribe for too long, so SongShift’s export option is also useful for creating backups.)
Oh, and Apple will only let you import playlists that you’ve created. If you want to transfer playlists that were created by other people, you’ll need to remake them manually. This is a fairly easy task in Spotify—just select all the tracks in a playlist, right click, and chuck them in a new playlist—but it may be more difficult on other streaming platforms.
There’s no mention of Apple Music Classical on Apple’s support page, by the way. I’m not sure how well this feature will work with classical music, as the genre is notoriously difficult to organize and label.
Again, Apple Music’s new playlist import feature is currently limited to Australia and New Zealand. A global rollout hasn’t been announced, and Apple hasn’t clarified whether this feature will gain additional functionality in the future. If you’re outside of Australia or New Zealand, I suggest that you use SongShift to transfer playlists.
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