Apple Music Now Lets You Transfer Your Tunes From Spotify

Apple Music is making it easy to shift your painstakingly-curated music and playlists from Spotify.

The streaming music giant this week unveiled a new tool that allows users in Australia, New Zealand and elsewhere to transfer content from other digital music services, including the market-leader, Spotify.

The transfer tool works for the Apple Music app on iPhone, iPad, Android device, or on the web, and is now live for users in Brazil, North America, France, Germany, Mexico, the UK and on both sides of the Tasman. Apple Music beta tested the tech last year in ANZ.

What you can transfer “varies and is determined by the service,” reads a statement, with the big move to Apple Music provided through a third-party alliance with SongShift. Some content might not be available or have an exact match in the Apple Music catalogue, the message continues.

Apple’s rollout of a music transfer tool will be seen as opportunistic, the tech giant doing so as Spotify finds itself in another tricky spot with the artist community and users.

A number of artists, including King Gizzard & the Lizard Wizard, Deerhoof, Godspeed You! Black Emperor, and David Bridie, have recently yanked their music from the platform, in protest to Spotify founder and CEO Daniel Ek’s billion dollar investment in the military AI startup Helsing.

“Dissatisfied with your music provider or want to try something new?,” reads a message from Apple. “SongShift transfers the music you love to the music provider you want.”

Apple is no small fish in the technology pond. In 2018, Apple became the first US public company to reach a market capitalisation of $1 trillion. Two years later it became the first to $2 trillion, and in 2023, the business passed the $3 trillion mark for the first time.

Though Apple does not disclose the amount of paid subscribers for its streaming platform, which opened for business in 2015, analysts put the global figure at about 95 million. 

That’s well behind Spotify, which boasts more than 696 million users, including 276 million subscribers, and operates in at least 180 markets.