How easy is it to swap music services?
Rather like switching banks, you might worry that switching streaming services would be a headache. What about all those playlists you have spent years carefully curating? Can you really face manually adding thousands of songs from scratch? Good news: you don’t have to.
In the same way banks now handle the transfer of Direct Debits and standing orders, so too are there web apps that will shift your playlists, saved songs and albums to another streaming service. You don’t even have to pay for the privilege. TuneMyMusic (head to
tunemymusic.com) will transfer your music collection between Spotify, Apple Music, Tidal, YouTube and others. I asked it to heave my 10,199 songs, albums and playlists from Spotify to Deezer and it completed the transfer in just over an hour. TuneMyMusic allows you to pick which parts of your library you want to transfer, so if there are playlists you haven’t touched in your old service for years, you can clear out the cruft.
If you’re (rightly) worried about handing your username and passwords to a third party, don’t be – you sign into the services themselves and use OAuth to give TuneMyMusic permission to edit your music libraries. TuneMyMusic doesn’t store your credentials and if you’re worried that it will tinker with your music at a later date, you can revoke its permissions after the transfer is complete. In Spotify, for example, go to spotify.com, click on your profile, select Apps from the left-hand menu and revoke TuneMyMusic from there.
Not all of my tracks survived the journey from Spotify to Deezer – 760 went AWOL. You can click on each playlist to see what’s gone missing. In a good number of cases, the missing tracks were recorded exclusively for Spotify, although there were some whole albums that weren’t available in Deezer.
TuneMyMusic is a free service – you don’t even need to register to perform a transfer. With no obvious onsite advertising, that does make one wonder what its angle is. A company spokesperson told me that it has a paid for-service which allows you to keep playlists in sync across two different streaming services.