I’m slowly weaning myself away from the use of the mainstream music streaming service - Spotify et al - both due to the problematic effects they increasingly seem to have on the industry and the now-radical idea that I might want to permanently own my music collection.

That said, I’m not there yet, and perhaps there will always be a role for them when it comes to, for instance, modern-day music discovery. Problematic or not, they do indisputably provide tremendous accessibility to a music library far beyond the ability of most individual humans to cultivate.

In the mean time, I wanted to reduce the fragility of my situation by replicating my library as far as possible between more than one service.

If, for instance, I only have my music libraries in the walled garden of Apple Music, there’s a (possibly paranoid) feeling that should they ever close my account, I feel compelled to close my account, some bug means they lose the details of my collection or I simply can’t afford the subscription any more then not only can I obviously no longer listen to my hand-picked collection, I also entirely lose access to what that collection was in the first place. Which albums I added to my libraries, which tracks I liked, the algorithm that suggests new music to me, all gone.

I don’t think there’s much I can do about the latter, algorithms are virtually never accessible or portable in their current instantiation. But in terms of one’s library and playlists, it is possible to try and recreate that in another service, say Spotify.

This will never work perfectly as another issue with the services is they don’t necessarily have the same music. If for instance you switch to Spotify from Apple or vice versa you may simply not have the option to listen to some of your preferred tracks, they’re just not on the service. Such is the penalty of not owning your collection. However, realistically, if your collection is vaguely mainstream most of it probably exists in most of the big services.

However, these wannabe-prison services do not want you to leave, so offer no universal way to export or import a useful list of what is in your collection that I can see. Data portability is probably the last thing they want - and something I’d love regulators to enforce one day. But for now by default it’d be a manual effort, laboriously going through everything you care about on one service and trying to search for it on the other service, saving to library, liking, whatever.

This is fairly untenable, or at least very tedious, if you have anything beyond a fairly small collection. But there are third party solutions that attempt to solve this problem by automating the search-and-save operation. You would have to give them access to the accounts you wish to transfer from and to, but if you’re comfortable with this then they can attempt to automate copying your libraries and playlists from one service to another.

In my case, I’m a big listen-to-albums fan so I was most concerned in copying my library of albums across to a new service. Let’s assume Apple Music to Spotify to take a common example. Importantly. I wanted my album library to appear as actual albums in Spotify, not as playlists containing the album’s songs. Some people prefer the latter of course or only use playlists in the first place. There’s no right way to do this kind of stuff.

So below is a list of services that promise to do this kind of thing that I compiled from a few searches for apps and services that can automate this transition, including what at-a-glance appeared to me as being their scope and their costs.

There’s a fairly wide range of pricing and features. Most are subscription based, although if you only want to do this kind of thing once you could just buy one month. You will generally have to pay if you have anything beyond a very small library, although many have a limited free version you could test to see how well it’s going to work for you.

A common feature some have is a continual sync of libraries across services. I was mainly interested just in testing a one-time operation at present but I can imagine use-cases for the latter.

Whilst my examples above all about Apple Music and Spotify, many of these products handle a much wider range of services so don’t let that put you off.

None of these are recommendations as such as I haven’t yet tried them. But as a starter list, here’s some options I found, their taglines, pricing and what their homepage indicated to me is their rough feature-set, in no particular order.

Playlists.cloud

Playlists.cloud - “Connect to your favorite music streaming services, transfer your music playlists between them, easily generate backups, and more.”

Features:

  • Supports Apple Music and Spotify
  • Works with playlists only
  • Transfer your playlists between Apple Music and Spotify, either as a one-off or a continuous sync.
  • Transfer your playlists from one account of a given service to another account of the same service.
  • Create new playlists by uploading a CSV file
  • Export playlists into a CSV file.
  • Free of charge.

SongShift

SongShift - “Simple Music Transfers and Sharing”

Features:

  • Supports many services: Amazon Music, Apple Music, Deezer, Discogs, Hype Machine, LastFM, Napster, Pandora, Qobuz, Spotify, TIDAL, YouTube.
  • Works with playlists, songs or albums.
  • Transfer your music from one provider to another either as a one-off or a continuous sync.
  • Share your playlists with anyone on any supported platform
  • Free and paid version ($9.99 per month, $39.99 per year, $59.99 lifetime). Not immediately obvious what the limits on the free version are except for being slower and able to connect more services at once.

Soundiiz

Soundiiz - “Transfer your playlists and favorites”

Features:

  • Supports 43 services, including Spotify, Apple Music, TIDAL, Amazon Music, YouTube Music
  • Works with playlists, albums, artists, and tracks - although some services may not work with some of these.
  • Transfer music between services either as a one-off or a continuous sync.
  • Create smartlinks to playlists and releases you can share.
  • Generate playlists using artificial intelligence.
  • Import and export your playlists from / to file.
  • Free and paid version (£4.5 per month, £36 per year). Free version looks to be limited to dealing with playlists, one at a time, and only up to 200 tracks per playlist and one active sync.

Free Your Music

Free Your Music - “Transfer, sync & move your music library”

  • Supports many services including Spotify, Apple Music, TIDAL, SoundCloud, Deezer.
  • Works with playlists, liked songs and albums.
  • Transfer music between services either as a one-off or a continuous sync.
  • Back up playlists in cloud.
  • Free and paid version. Free version lets you transfer up to 100 songs and 1 playlist, or 300 songs if you provide an email. Paid services include one-off £10.99 for “basic” or £34.99 per year / or £4.66 per month for premium. Basic version doesn’t allow automatic syncing or backup.

Tune My Music

Tune My Music - “Transfer Playlists Between Music Services”

  • Supports many services including Spotify, TIDAL, Apple Music, YouTube, Amazon Music and Deezer.
  • Works with playlists, favorite songs, favourite artists, favorite albums.
  • Transfer music between services either as a one-off or a continuous sync.
  • Share your music with friends who use other music services.
  • Upload songs to your library via a file (I think this must surely mean uploading a playlist, not a song itself!).
  • Backup your music library (again I think this means your playlists etc. via exporting a CSV - not the music files themselves).
  • Free and paid version ($4.50 per month or $24 per year). Free plan limits you to transferring up to 500 tracks, no syncing.

Playlisty

Playlisty - “The Playlist Tool for Apple Music / Spotify”

  • Has one app that works to get music into Apple Music and a different one to get music into Spotify.
  • Works with playlists, mixes, liked tracks and albums.
  • Can transfer playlists from several music services into Apple Music / Spotify, or also import them from text, weblinks or various file formats. You can browse other people’s playlists from various music sites too.
  • Can export playlists to a file.
  • Free trial version lets you create playlists up to 20 tracks. Paid in-app purchase of a one-off $2.99 unlocks other features.

Playlistor

Playlistor - “Convert playlists between Apple Music and Spotify”

  • Supports Apple Music and Spotify
  • Playlists only
  • Paste in the URL of a playlist and the site will convert it to the appropriate services, no signup required.
  • Only one playlist at a time. It seems really designed as a useful service to share a single playlist with someone who uses another service, not designed to transfer your library from one account to another so wasn’t actually suited to this list.
  • Free