If you’re looking to ditch Spotify because of its ongoing defense of Joe Rogan’s problematic podcast, its lack of privacy features, or its unfair pay structures for artists, you aren’t alone. Fueled by the pandemic and a new focus on podcasting, Spotify’s subscriber count has been growing, but the platform’s PR fumbling and non-apologies around COVID misinformation and racism on The Joe Rogan Experience have prompted a wave of cancelations from upset listeners.
Canceling your Spotify Premium subscription and halting payments to the company is simple, but leaving the platform entirely has its complications. Obviously, you’ll want to keep the playlists you’ve curated with your friends and family. Spotify doesn’t have any tool to save or transfer your playlists, but luckily a handful of solid third-party services have brought solutions to the table. (Go here for a step-by-step guide on how to ditch Spotify for Apple Music.)
How to transfer your Spotify playlists using third-party services
If you don’t want to go through the hassle of rebuilding your favorite playlists song by song, there are a few services that will help shift your playlists to a new service like Apple Music or Tidal with just a few taps. Each one of these tools has its own step-by-step tutorial for navigating the transfer process so we won’t get into the nitty-gritty details, but we’ll explain each service below, its best features, and what a paid subscription gets you.
Whichever service you use, you’ll need your log-in information for every account you’re using handy.
SongShift
SongShift is incredibly easy to use. The app will walk you through logging into and connecting your music services and creating “Shifts” (playlist transfers) and the UI is incredibly easy to navigate. All you need to do is select a playlist source and destination and the app will collect all of your songs in an instant. We moved one 7-hour playlist with upwards of 120 songs from Spotify to Tidal and it took less than a minute. If SongShift cannot find a correct match for a song, it will alert you and you can do a bit of manual matching.
There is a Pro subscription tier for $4.99 monthly or $19.99 annually that includes features like sped up transfer times, more universal playlist sharing, and playlist syncing between services, but none of them are huge draws. The only bummer with the free tier is that you can only connect two music services at once — but even that isn’t a dealbreaker since most folks are just transferring playlists from one service to another, not syncing playlists between five different platforms.
Soundiiz
If you don’t want to download another app or want to move playlists between lesser-known music services, Soundiiz is the tool for you. It may not look as pretty as SongShift or FreeYourMusic (it looks like an ugly version of the Spotify web player) but it's still simple to use once you get the hang of it. After you connect your music services, transferring playlists from one to another only takes a few clicks.
You can transfer as many songs and playlists as you like using the free version of the tool, but you are limited to transferring one playlist at a time. That can take up a bit of time if you’ve got a massive library. For just $3, you can upgrade to a premium plan to batch transfer all of your playlists.
FreeYourMusic
FreeYourMusic is versatile — the app is available for iOS, Android, Windows, macOS, and Linux. The UI is very clean and easy to use. All you need to do is select a source platform, the playlists you’d like to transfer, and a destination. The app does the rest.
For a one-time payment of $14.99, you can unlock unlimited transfers. There are two other paid plans, but like SongShift, the extra features really aren’t worth it. The free plan allows you to transfer just 100 songs from one playlist. That’s what it claims at least. When we tested FreeYourMusic, we hit our 100-song limit but between four playlists.
This is an example of the several tiny inconsistencies we ran into with the service. Our Spotify account connected in an instant but we were unable to log in to Tidal or Pandora using the app for some reason. When we transferred a few playlists from Spotify to YouTube Music with the mobile app it told us there were no missing songs, but when we checked the playlists in a web browser later there were a few songs missing from our playlists. The service isn’t perfect and you will have to do some double-checking to make sure your transfers go through properly, but it definitely works and is relatively easy to use.
