Apple has announced a new feature that’s pretty strange for a company that thrives on keeping users in the Apple ecosystem: an official way to export playlists to another music service. While it’s very unlike Apple, it can be incredibly useful for someone looking to test another service and ditch Apple Music for any reason. We’ll show you how it works.
Apple’s transfer tool is integrated into its Data & Privacy Page, which functions kind of like Google Takeout. This is where Apple allows users to export their data from Apple servers to migrate elsewhere. Of course, this doesn’t always work as well as expected, but it’s great for archival purposes.
There are many options on this page, but we want to select the option to transfer a copy of your data.
The next page shows Apple’s options for moving your data. Currently, it’s a pretty short list: YouTube Music and Google Photos. There’s a lot of speculation about Apple’s relationship with Spotify here. Still, I think the simple fact is that it’s easier to work with Google for data migration, as evidenced by the Google Photos transfer option. Regardless, we want to pick the option to export playlists to YouTube Music.
The next few pages are straightforward. Apple will ask you to authenticate the Google account for YouTube Music, including signing in and checking a few boxes. This is what lets the services connect and move music over.
After you’re authenticated, you’ll click the playlist category to move over and confirm it, beginning the process. Apple notes that it can take up to 24 hours to migrate over fully, and it won’t delete anything from your Apple Music account. In my experience (which was only a couple dozen playlists) the entire transition happened in about 5 minutes, but if you have hundreds of playlists with thousands of songs your timing may be a little longer.
So here’s the fine print on transferring playlists. It’ll move over all of your custom playlists but won’t bring over absolutely everything. Curated playlists from Apple’s team don’t transfer; it’ll only migrate songs on YouTube Music’s catalog. YTM easily matches most of Apple’s music catalog, but I’m sure there are some edge cases, especially with deluxe albums. Additionally, music that you’ve uploaded yourself to Apple Music won’t be transferred with this tool; it only matches the songs in the playlists, and it’s not actually uploading any audio files to Google servers.
If Apple’s tool isn’t your thing or you want more flexibility, you do have other options. We’ve written a full guide on syncing your playlists and music library across multiple services, which you can find here.
Happy listening!
