Whenever Spotify offers a sweet deal, I’m quite tempted to ditch my preferred music streaming app–YouTube Music–and use Spotify from here on out. There’s one problem though: I will have to move my playlists from one service to another, and each of my playlists has hundreds of songs.
Neither YouTube (and its music streaming service YouTube Music) nor Spotify does not have a built-in ability to copy playlists between each other. I’d have to manually import/export my playlists one at a time, tediously one track at a time. Thankfully, I found some third-party tools and services that helped me streamline the process. If you want to export and import playlists, check these out:
Transfer music using Soundiiz
To start transferring your playlists from YouTube to Spotify using Soundiiz web app:
- Sign up for a new account at Soundiiz.
- At the playlists page, click the Let’s Go button. Find YouTube among the supported platforms and click Connect.
- In a newly opened dialog box, log in to your Google account. Click Allow to grant Soundiiz access to your Google account so it can then access your YouTube account.
- Go back to the playlists page, find Spotify, and click Connect.
- Log in to Spotify, then click Agree to give Soundiiz access to your Spotify account.
- With both services now connected to Soundiiz, you can now begin copying your playlists. Click the Close button. Your playlists page should now be populated with your existing playlists from YouTube and Spotify.
- Find the YouTube playlist you’d like to copy or transfer to Spotify, click the ellipsis button directly to its right, and then click Convert To.
- In the dialog box, configure your playlist by changing the title and description. There are also options to delete duplicate tracks and set the playlist to private. Click Save Configuration when you’re done.
- Confirm the tracklist. Here you can unselect songs you don’t want to export. Click Confirm to proceed.
- Select Spotify as your target/destination music streaming service.
- Wait for the conversion to finish. Once done, your target service will now have the playlist. If it doesn’t appear, try restarting the app first.
Sometimes, the playlist conversion may show errors. These are songs that Soundiiz failed to find equivalent versions of on Spotify (mainly due to song title mismatches). You’ll have to manually search and add these missing songs onto your newly created Spotify playlist. Also watch out for erroneously converted songs—wrong performing artist, wrong album, wrong version (remix, remaster, original, etc.).
Copying your Spotify playlists to YouTube is essentially the same. With Soundiiz, you simply need to pick the former as the source and the latter as destination.
The free account on Soundiiz allows you to convert playlists one by one, which is good enough for the occasional transfers. For $3 a month, Soundiiz has a premium subscription with advanced features such as syncing of playlists across multiple platforms and modifying imported playlists.
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Transfer your playlist via TuneMyMusic
Copying/moving playlists using TuneMyMusic works similarly to Soundiiz. The former, however, doesn’t support as many music streaming services as the latter. Its free membership only allows you to convert up to 1000 tracks and has no automatic syncs. For $2 a month, TuneMyMusic offers unlimited conversions and up to 20 automatic syncs of playlists between streaming services.
Supported Platforms
Another great thing about these two third-party playlist converters is that they support several platforms besides YouTube and Spotify. Some of the supported major platforms include:
- Amazon Music
- Apple Music
- Deezer
- KKBox
- Last.fm
- Napster
- Pandora
- SoundCloud
- Tidal
As mentioned above, these streaming services have limited (if not missing) capabilities to export your music to other services. After all, they naturally prefer to keep their existing customers within their own platform. But thanks to Soundiiz and TuneMyMusic we music lovers can switch between platforms conveniently whenever we want.
Other Third-Party Playlist Transfer Services
If Soundiiz and TuneMyMusic somehow fail to transfer your playlists between two streaming services, listed below are other alternatives you can try. Some are available as apps on Android and iOS.