Last year, I had the unfortunate experience of losing all my playlists when I switched from Apple Music to Spotify. To me, playlists are important. They’re snapshots of a time in your life; maybe your summer of 2016 had a certain soundtrack to it. But, traditionally, music streaming services don’t make it easy to take playlists with you to other platforms.
So you can imagine how excited I was to see that Apple Music created a new playlist transfer tool through the Data Transfer Initiative (DTI), a group founded by Apple, Google, and Meta to create data portability tools. Europe’s Digital Markets Act requires these designated “gatekeepers” to fund transfer tools as part of a broader remedy to Big Tech’s strategy to lock users into their platforms.
Finally! Except there was one big problem. The tools don’t work with the world’s most popular music service, Spotify, which seemingly didn’t catch the data portability wave (or maybe a regulator isn’t telling them to). The DTI’s tool only transfers between Apple Music and YouTube Music, making it a lot less useful for most people.
The DTI’s executive director, Chris Riley, is fed up with Big Tech’s lock-in policies as well. He’s been trying to get more companies to come to the negotiating table and make their services more portable.
“We’ve kind of gotten baked into this world over the past decade of just feeling stuck,” said Riley in an interview with TechCrunch. “I don’t think enough people know this is something they should have.”
Acknowledging the DTI’s limitations, Riley suggested I transfer my playlists from Apple Music to Spotify using Soundiiz, a free third-party tool. Instead of working directly with streaming services, Soundiiz builds portability tools through existing APIs and acts as a translator between the services. Within minutes, I was able to link my accounts, transfer my playlists, and start listening to my old Apple Music playlists on Spotify. It was awesome and easy.
Soundiiz allows you to transfer playlists between Apple Music, Spotify, YouTube Music, Amazon Music, Tidal, Deezer, SoundCloud, and 20 other streaming services I’ve never even heard of. There’s a simple user interface to connect your streaming services and pick the playlists you want to transfer over, including ones that someone else has created.
The story behind Soundiiz might explain why it works so well, and cheaply. It was created in 2013 by two friends in France, Thomas Magnano and Benoit Herbreteau, who loved listening to music while coding together. During nights, they set out to create a music search interface with inputs from all over the web. In the process, they created a useful tool.
They never made the music search interface, but the playlist transfer tool became Soundiiz.
“I had to manipulate APIs and test match between services. While doing this, I created playlists and moved them between services, just for myself internally,” said Magnano in an interview with TechCrunch. “I presented this feature to my colleague and we thought, ‘Oh it’s useful for me; maybe it is useful for someone else.’”
By 2015, Soundiiz got its big break when it partnered with Tidal, the music service founded by Jay-Z. The music platform was trying to make it easier for people to leave Spotify and join Tidal with all their same playlists, and Soundiiz helped. However, Magnano says they made sure Tidal allowed people to export playlists as well, not just import — something they require of any music service API they work with.
After that, a lot more people started using the service, and the creators made Soundiiz their full-time jobs, but they’ve kept their values. The two founders make a living off of Soundiiz but tell TechCrunch they’re “not looking to get rich.” Magnano says Soundiiz has never sought outside investments in order to keep its prices low, and the founders maintain control of their project.
There are limits to the free Soundiiz, though — it will cut some of your longer playlists short (there’s a cap at 200 songs). Also, you have to transfer playlists one by one, and each one takes about a minute, so transferring a dozen playlists could take a while. Soundiiz offers a premium plan ($4.50 a month, and you can cancel after your transfer) to get around these limitations.
The two founders are still the only employees at Soundiiz, despite growing quite a bit: In the last 10 years, Soundiiz has helped millions of people transfer more than 220 million playlists. They’ve never spent a dime on marketing, according to Magnano, but he says they never needed to.
“If you searched Google for ‘how to transfer Deezer to Spotify’ in 2012, there was no answer,” said Magnano. “So Soundiiz became the first result on Google Search when we came out, and since then, we’ve maintained a great rank in SEO.”
Magnano says Spotify probably has more to lose than win creating a playlist transfer tool like Apple and Google, and he doesn’t expect that to change soon. However, he says all these streaming services are aware of what Soundiiz does, and they’re okay with it — some even promote it in their FAQs. That said, it’s unlikely any of them are going to promote playlist transfer services like Soundiiz any more than that.