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How-To: Move your playlists from Spotify, Rdio, and more to Apple Music

With the launch of Apple Music just around the corner, music lovers currently subscribed to competing services like Spotify and Rdio may be looking to jump ship and give Apple’s offering a try. Apple first confirmed in a Beats Music FAQ that there will be a Beats Music update that allows users to import their libraries to the newer service, but users with music collections elsewhere seem to be out of luck without any official migration tool.

Thankfully, there’s an unofficial route to import all of your playlists from multiple services to Apple Music, but you’ll need to act before the 30th if you don’t already have a Beats Music account as Apple could turn off new subscriptions (and trials) at any moment.

Since Apple will officially support migration from Beats Music, you can currently use that service as a bridge between Spotify, Rdio, and several other sources. In order to do this, you’ll need a Beats Music account (the two-week free trial will do just fine).

[tweet https://twitter.com/pinkham/status/615617302998986752 align=’center’]

[Update: As seen in the tweet above, it seems the sudden influx of traffic has caused Beats to rate limit the importer, causing it to become unavailable at the moment.]

Once you’re set up on Beats Music, head over to the unofficial Beats Importer and use the button at the top of the page to login to your Beats Music account. This site uses the Beats API to connect to your account, so you don’t need to worry about it doing anything shady with your login credentials.

From here you’ll have a variety of sources to chose from. You can connect to Spotify or a public Rdio account, pull in a playlist file from iTunes or Windows Media Player, or import a CSV/XML file from other apps and services.

The Beats Importer will automatically find the music in these playlists on Beats and create a matching list on your account. When Apple Music launches tomorrow morning, a Beats app update will allow you to import those newly created playlists into Apple Music, and you’ll be able to take advantage of your curated playlists right from the begining rather than spending hours recreating all of your previous work.

As noted above, Apple could shut off new sign-ups for Beats Music at any time leading up to tomorrow’s Apple Music launch as the new service replaces the service Apple acquired (although existing customers won’t immediately lose their account as Apple develops the Android version of Apple Music being released this fall), so you’re going to want to sign up quickly if you don’t already have an account but want to take advantage of the Beats Importer to move from Spotify, Rdio, or other services.

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Comments

  1. Cory © (@Nardes) - 9 years ago

    I just created a Beats account so I could move my Spotify playlists over more easily… good lord what a mess Beats is. I thought I did a pretty good job showing them the type of music I like… apparently I only listen to 90s rock and early 2010s pop…… uhhhhhh nah.

    • freediverx - 9 years ago

      It works better when you start following artists and playlist curators.

      • Joe - 9 years ago

        Definitely. I’ve been using it for months and every time I launch it it has a few playlists that I love. Design is much better than Spotify.

      • Lucas Macedo - 9 years ago

        They really didn’t get it. I don’t want an artist or a curator to say what’s best for me to hear.
        Music is social. I want my friends to do that. Spotify got that right. :/

      • And what if one of your friends is in fact an artist/curator? ;)

  2. jacosta45 - 9 years ago

    The link doesn’t seem to work anymore :\

    • Cory © (@Nardes) - 9 years ago

      It works… it’s just SUPER slow. I thought the same thing, but it takes forever for the page to load, then just as long to doing everything else

    • Ronaldo Villanueva - 9 years ago

      same here

    • jacosta45 - 9 years ago

      It does. Just under heavy usage unfortunately.

    • Mike Beasley - 9 years ago

      Probably a big influx of traffic. It was working instantly when I wrote this.

      • gpinkham - 9 years ago

        that’s what it is.. I just bounced my little itty bitty server and added CPU and memory. . sorry for the issues.. just didn’t expect the traffic.. I will keep an eye on things and will try to add more if I can (don’t want to break the bank though!)

  3. William - 9 years ago

    You can’t create a Beats account outside the US (correct?)
    Also the beats importer has just fallen over.

    • William - 9 years ago

      By the way… no-one’s said anything about an update to iTunes (i.e. on OS X) in the last few weeks – seems fairly obvious there will be a link in the store somewhere to Beats 1, but how many of the new Apple Music features (e.g. the customised radio stations or listening to tracks of your choice from the Apple Music library) will you be able to use from the desktop?

      • Mike Beasley - 9 years ago

        all of it, i believe. apparently there’s even a horribly offensive new itunes icon to go with the update.

  4. tomtubbs - 9 years ago

    https://account.beatsmusic.com/login and Cloak for the VPN (buy a pass on the ios app, can use on the mac) working, though slow importer

  5. eddygeez - 9 years ago

    No longer working, getting the error message:

    Issue uploading playlist : Developer Over Rate

  6. Terrence Newton - 9 years ago

    Every time I try to connect to Beats it tells me something went wrong.

  7. Tom Farrant (@farrantt) - 9 years ago

    Don’t think this works outside of the US

  8. gpinkham - 9 years ago

    BTW. Beats has shut off my site at the moment.. I’m over my rate limit for API access.. I have asked them to increase this but it’s why folks are getting a sorry page..

  9. thewiccaman - 9 years ago

    Fantastic tip, much appreciated. But wait, what’s this! Beats music ‘not yet available in the UK’ but it ‘is coming soon …’ Thanks for nothing

  10. Victor Bogo - 9 years ago

    Nice alternative to migrate Spotify’s playlists to Beats Music : http://sqoochapp.com/

    • dv1dee - 9 years ago

      This one is held up also… but it has a sweet queue to let you know your position.

      • gpinkham - 9 years ago

        I like the queue.. it’s been on my todo list forever.. ;-)

    • Amber (@amburroni) - 9 years ago

      I’m in the queue right now with sqooch, waiting at spot 80. I’m wondering… if I update to iOS 8.4 while I’m still in the queue, will this mess anything up? Anyone know?

      • dv1dee - 9 years ago

        You are safe to update to iOS 8.4 and you can still make changes and tidy up your Spotify playlist if you need to while you wait. I’m at spot 50 now but I started in the queue at 61, so everything seems to be moving… rather slowly… but it’s moving closer to being my turn even after I updated my iPhone iOS, so thats something. Cheers

  11. nyctravis - 9 years ago

    I used this nifty little service back when apple bought beats and it worked great although it took a bit of attention. The guy is very responsive (as you can see) and super nice. Well worth the effort to use it, saved me more than a few hours of manually transferring my spotify playlists.

  12. gpinkham - 9 years ago

    Sorry folks.. a few hours later and still no response from beats nor apple. I really hope they re-enable the API soon.. probably not the best first impression..

    • gpinkham - 9 years ago

      So its past midnight “API time”.. (apparently they use GMT for the API timezome.. so the beatsimporter site is back up.. it is slow at times as it’s getting slammed.. I’m trying to improve this (already quadrupled the servers (and costs :-( ) we’re see what tomorrow brings..

  13. jxslepton - 9 years ago

    I use primarily IOS devices but still don’t see how this is better than radio’s $3.99 service.

  14. appleoftheye - 9 years ago

    Thank you for this article! Was hoping there would be a way to move my playlists over. So much time and history in creating the playlists. Hopefully the link works tomorrow.

    • gpinkham - 9 years ago

      should be working again (though rather slow.. I’m working on improving the speed and reliability.. )

  15. Chad Devoley - 9 years ago

    Has anyone tried this with Google Play Music?

  16. Kenneth Gilbert - 9 years ago

    Site down 10:11 GMT.

    Get a donate button for $help.

    Thanks … Ken

  17. I just hope there will come up a sync for artist I am following and saved albums in Spotify for Apple Music too..don’t like to to do this twice :(

  18. kjl3000 - 9 years ago

    Spotify will be dead within a year.

    • gpinkham - 9 years ago

      so long as everyone uses beatsimporter to migrate.. :-)

  19. gpinkham - 9 years ago

    I think it’s time to throw in the towel. Beats nor Apple have responded to any support requests. At this point I do not think they care if we can convert from Spotify.. they will get millions of users just by having the Apple logo on it so they really don’t need BeatsImporter’s help. I will likely shut this down soon as I don’t like paying the bill for the servers when people can’t use the service..

    • bpmajesty - 9 years ago

      Hey, you get credit for trying.

      God bless, man!

    • Keep it going a couple more days if you can. Some people made took your advice and created a beats account just to use your site to migrate their playlists. It’s insanely slow but its still kinda working.

      Great job btw.

      • gpinkham - 9 years ago

        I’ll leave it up for a while.. I’m trying to fix the slowness. wasn’t really expecting the number of users its getting so I didn’t set up things appropriately for that.. wish I had built that queue mechanism that’s on my todo list.. maybe I’ll sneak it in while doing the day job today.. :-)

  20. Ashley J. Haigh - 9 years ago

    Well I was late to the party. Can’t even get a beats account now. To Beatsimporter; cud of for trying to keep it going.

  21. gpinkham - 9 years ago

    hey folks.. curious if anyone who did the Migration from Beats to Apple had a Family account? Before I migrate I want to make sure everyone’s playlists come across..

  22. ramonfritsch - 9 years ago

    I’ve built this tool. A little complicated but I was able to import all my 1400+ tracks.

    http://movetoapplemusic.ramonfritsch.com/

    • gpinkham - 9 years ago

      nice! its sad that Apple doesn’t support an API for this. I started asking them about this last September.. crickets.. :-) if only Spotify would match the family plan price. I’d switch back in a heartbeat..

    • dv1dee - 9 years ago

      Yeeeeeaaaaahhhh it’s working. Thank you. Thnk u. TnkU. I really don’t make playlist but I wanted a quick way to move my tracks directly into iTunes bypassing Beats Music. Maybe a little more clarity is needed for some other peeps but this brutha was able to figure it out. Thanks again.

  23. You can now transfer all of your music from Spotify to Apple Music by using iSpotMusic. Check out: http://www.ispotmusic.com and https://youtu.be/hUcrqpsefV8

  24. siqusports (@siqusports) - 9 years ago

    @markryan1990 thanks for the tip, iSpotMusic works well in combination with there chrome extension “Export Spotify Playlist”

  25. Lal Antony (@lal_antony) - 8 years ago

    I put together a website to assist user to get this working easily (mainly for non-tech users). Visit http://rdiotogooglemusic.com Let me know what you guys think.