Photo Credit: Mariia Shalabaieva
You can now move from Apple Music over to YouTube Music with a new tool to export your playlists.
As music streaming services add more usability, switching between them has always been a chore. And it makes sense; no streaming service wants to make it easier for you to switch over to a competitor. But now Apple is flipping the script, launching an official tool to transfer your music from Apple Music to another service.
Apple outlines the new transfer tool in a support document published this week, built by the Data Transfer Initiative, which allows you to copy your playlists to YouTube Music. The tool can work in as little as a few minutes, but may take longer depending on the amount of data being transferred. Further, the tool doesn’t delete anything from Apple Music.
Content that does not get transferred includes music files you’ve uploaded to Apple Music, or collaborative playlists of which you are not the owner, as well as shared and curated playlists. The songs transferred must also already exist on YouTube Music.
To use the new tool, users should head to Apple’s new Data and Privacy page, where they can sign in and select the option to “transfer a copy of your data.” From there, they’ll sign into their YouTube Music account to finish the transfer, which involves giving Apple permission to access your Google account.
The process is very similar to Apple’s process for moving iCloud photos and videos to Google Photos, which launched in July. But it’s notable that the new transfer tool is specific to YouTube Music and omits Spotify — Apple Music’s biggest competitor. The process is also available in reverse, bringing your YouTube Music playlists over to Apple Music.
It’s interesting that Apple, of all companies, is the one to launch such a tool. But since it doesn’t include Spotify, it shows that perhaps Apple doesn’t find YouTube Music a significant competitor. Last year, YouTube Music had about 13 million fewer paid subscribers than Apple Music.
