How to import Spotify playlists into Apple Music

Image of a Spotify logo appearing on a smartphone sandwiched between two wireless earbuds
(Image credit: Shutterstock)

Spotify is a fantastic service, particularly in regard to its curated playlists, which put a hefty amount of both big data analytics and human expertise into tailor-making some of the best mixes around.

Sadly, die-hard Apple Music fans have had to miss out on these excellent playlists - until now. With iOS 9.3, the company has allowed app developers to access Apple Music, meaning you can now import all Spotify's playlists into Apple music, along with your own customised tracklists.

The best way to accomplish this is with SongShift, a new iOS app that will take care of most of the work for you. Unfortunately, although Apple Music is available on Android devices, SongShift has yet to make it to the Google Play store, so this method is iOS-only for now. It's also limited to iOS 9.3 and later.

Once you've downloaded and set up SongShift, which includes logging into Spotify and authorising it to access your media library, just click the 'begin import' button to get started.

A list of all of your Spotify playlists will appear, so if you want to import any of the curated playlists, you'll need to follow them through Spotify first.

It's also worth noting that any changes made by the playlist's creators won't be registered by the imported version, so if you want to keep them up to date, you'll need to do it manually.

Select which playlist you want to import, and SongShift will give you the option of putting it straight into your music library, or into a specific playlist on Apple Music. Apple still doesn't let developers create their own playlists, so make sure you've got a pre-existing Apple Music playlist to drop the Spotify versions into.

While the app is pretty good at maintaining the track order of playlists, it's not perfect, so particularly fastidious users may want to do a spot of re-arranging. It also requires a £1.49 in-app purchase if you want to import playlists with over 100 songs.

Adam Shepherd

Adam Shepherd has been a technology journalist since 2015, covering everything from cloud storage and security, to smartphones and servers. Over the course of his career, he’s seen the spread of 5G, the growing ubiquity of wireless devices, and the start of the connected revolution. He’s also been to more trade shows and technology conferences than he cares to count.

Adam is an avid follower of the latest hardware innovations, and he is never happier than when tinkering with complex network configurations, or exploring a new Linux distro. He was also previously a co-host on the ITPro Podcast, where he was often found ranting about his love of strange gadgets, his disdain for Windows Mobile, and everything in between.

You can find Adam tweeting about enterprise technology (or more often bad jokes) @AdamShepherUK.

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