A Migrant’s Diary
Moving from Spotify to Apple Music? There are some things you need to know.
Just over a month ago I cancelled our Spotify family subscription. Spotify provided the backing tracks to my life over the last 8+ years and I wasn’t expecting the split to be easy. If you are contemplating this journey yourself there are some things you need to know and to that end, I kept a diary.
Day 0: Decision day
It has been building for a while but it wasn’t any of the things I thought it would be. Not the continued lack of native Airplay support in the Spotify MacOS app. Not the irritating inclusion of podcasts. Not even the growing sense of hi-res inferiority.
No, the reason for the break was Ted Lasso.
More specifically, that if I am going to get to see Season 2 I’m going to have to either find a way to get it for free or pay an extra £5 a month for Apple TV+, something that’s just never going to happen.
As far as I can see there are 2 ways to get ATV+ for free:
- Buy yet another bit of Apple hardware and get it bundled. Tempting but not sustainable given that our house already looks like an Apple Store;
- Switch to Apple One and get it bundled with Apple Music and iCloud (which I already pay for).
So here we are: my Spotify account is now downgraded to a Free account and I’ve now got to work out how the whole Apple family thing works so that I can share my shiny new Apple Music subscription with my husband.
Day 1: First impressions
I used iTunes on Macs for years so it’s not been a huge leap, especially since at times the “new” Music app feels suspiciously similar to “old” iTunes.
Likes so far: proper Airplay support on the Mac at last. I like that podcasts are nowhere to be seen. I love having lyrics. Radio support is good, although BBC stations are annoyingly absent. On iOS, the app feels a lot more polished than Spotify.
Dislikes are plenty though: on the Mac the Music app feels sluggish when browsing Apple Music. When I try to re-create those musical journeys you go through on Spotify where each thing you play leads to ever greater possibilities and you end-up going down a musical rabbit hole for hours, it feels clunky. I keep hitting dead-ends.
But by far the thing I miss the most are Spotify’s generated playlists (Daily Mixes, Discover Weekly, Release Radar etc). I know I have to use Apple Music for a while before it will generate equivalents for these, but I hadn’t realised how much I’d miss them.
I’ve spent some time mulling over MacOS Music app preferences too. There’s one in particular I just don’t get: “Add Playlist Songs”.
I mainly use my Library for albums. It’s a quick way to find works from my favourite artists and is a different, non-playlist way of looking at music I love. If I understand this setting correctly, if it’s switched-on my Library will fill-up with any random crap I happen to add to a playlist. How could this possibly make sense to anyone? Why is it on by default? I’ve turned it off on both MacOS & iOS.
That’s it for today. Tomorrow’s task will be to get my playlists and “Likes” copied over from Spotify.
Day 2: Migration
Objective: get all my playlists, liked songs and albums over from Spotify so that Apple Music starts to feel a bit more like home. A quick Google suggests that there are dozens of apps and services which will do this for free. Strangely this does not thrill me: if there’s a decent, free way of doing this then why did the market need another dozen decent, free ways of doing it? It doesn’t sound like a great business model. There’s going to be a catch.
A quick search on the app store confirms my fears: most of the apps seem to be either abandonware, hosts to expensive in-app purchases (or worse, subscriptions), or both.
After some more Googling and a few trips to Reddit I’ve drawn-up a shortlist: SongShift, FreeYourMusic, Soundiiz & TuneMyMusic. I ruled-out Houdini (not available in UK), Playlisty (free version only does 20 tracks per playlist), Switcheroo (Ads!) and a long list of other smaller players (based mostly on App Store reviews, or lack thereof).
Day 3: No free lunches
Well, that’s 4 hours I’ll never get back. There were times when I was ready to pack it all in and re-create my playlists manually, row by row. It turns out that all of the apps that actually work have limitations which means you can’t quite get the whole job done unless you pay £££ for an in-app purchase. Who would have thought it?
Anyway I’ve now tried them all and after what seemed like an eternity of watching little animations of songs whizzing across my screen, we have a winner. Embarrassingly, it’s Playlisty.
It’s embarrassing because professionally I’m a freelance business analyst and can run product evaluations in my sleep. If, in my day-job, the winning product was one I’d ruled-out in the first round I’d rightly get fired.
The truth is that Playlisty came back in to play the moment I decided I might actually have to pay something to get the job done. It’s the cheapest, basically.
I have around 760 albums & 1,300 liked songs in my Spotify library. I also have around 50 playlists, some of which are very long (2k+ tracks). Playlisty did the whole lot in about 5 mins (I didn’t time it exactly) which might seem like an age but is so quick compared to the other products that at first I thought it was broken. So far I haven’t found a single error.
To be fair, some of the free versions are actually Ok if all you want to do is transfer some shortish playlists, and you aren’t bothered about how long it takes, the odd mismatch and whether everything arrives in the right order (I’m looking at you, TuneMyMusic). You can see my full review here but as soon as you start talking about liked songs, albums and large libraries, just grit your teeth and fork out £2 for Playlisty. Trust me.
Day 7: Living with Apple Music
No sign of my personal mixes yet, despite religiously loving/disliking everything I’ve listened to over the last week and loving all of the songs & albums I imported from Spotify. I feel this will make or break Apple Music for me because so far I’m not really getting-on with Apple’s own playlists.
On the plus side Apple seem to have put a lot of effort into manually curated playlists and some of these, particularly the couple of artist “essentials” I’ve listened to, are pretty good.
More broadly, and I really hate to say this, I find a lot of their curated playlists a bit US-centric.
Let me explain.
My personal taste in music tends towards electronic music, including quite a bit of dance music, but it tends to be quite Euro-centric. Apple Music has a New Releases playlist maintained by Anjunadeep (one of my favourite labels) which is brilliant and I’ve been listening to it a lot. However whenever I stray beyond this into any of the many other curated electronic and/or dance playlists on Apple Music they seem to be chock full of US EDM stuff. This wasn’t so true on Spotify.
I know what you’re thinking: “She just said she likes electronic & dance music, and now she’s complaining about too much electronic dance music?”. Honestly I have nothing against EDM (well OK if you really press me I’d say it’s formulaic and sounds like it was invented to sell vocoders) but it’s just not for me.
Day 13: Falling out of love
Where are my “loved” songs, Apple?
WHERE ARE MY BLOODY LOVED SONGS APPLE????
I feel like a complete idiot: for 2 weeks I’ve been religiously “loving” all the songs I like and occasionally “disliking” ones I don’t. I’ve been doing this for the same two reasons I’ve always done it on Spotify: firstly, so that the algorithm gets to know my musical tastes, and secondly so that I can go back and listen to them later.
Today I thought it would be nice to go back and shuffle some of the songs I’d liked over the last fortnight. So I start looking for a “Loved Songs” playlist, and it’s not there. And then I Google it because I’m obviously looking in the wrong place and it turns out there’s no such thing on Apple Music.
I’m speechless. There must be 20–30 songs that I liked enough to tell the algorithm about and it seems I have no way to find out what they were.
Day 13.5: Thank EU
If you work in Tech and you work for a large corporation you will probably have heard of GDPR. You will know it’s an EU Regulation that gives EU citizens certain rights over their personal data. You will know it’s a complete pain in the arse with few real benefits to the end user.
Except that after a lot more Googling I’ve found one thing that it’s actually good for: my “loved” tracks count as personal data and therefore I can use GDPR to force Apple to tell me what they were.
People on Reddit say it takes a few days but it works. I’ve filled in the form here: https://privacy.apple.com. We shall see.
Day 18: The last to know
One of my favourite bands released a new album last week and I had no idea. In Spotify my Release Radar would have been all over it, but in Apple Music there was complete silence.
This is not rocket science. It doesn’t require a deep pool of listening data and an advanced proprietary ML algo to work out that a) if I’ve said I like a band and b) the band has a new record out then c) I might want to hear about it.
Apparently when the stars align Apple Music will occasionally notify you about new releases, but until it works reliably there’s an app called MusicHarbor which seems to do the job very well. The free version does everything you need and £5 gets you the full version, which lets you filter by albums and lets you tweak the UI. I think it’s 100% worth it.
Day 21: My Loves Return
I logged-in to https://privacy.apple.com again today to see what’s been taking so long with my “loved” tracks personal data request and the file had clearly been sitting there waiting for me for several days. Thanks for notifying me, Apple. You clearly want to make this as painful as possible.
Anyway I downloaded the ZIP, extracted the relevant file and used Playlisty to import it. I now have a playlist with all of my loved tracks from week 1&2 in it.
Apple, you really, really have to make this easier. Spotify does this much better.
Day 30: “For You” Day!
Finally my “For You” playlists have arrived: New Music, Chill, Favourites & Get Up!
They are underwhelming but mostly Ok, for a first attempt.
The last 3 are mostly constructed from tracks I already know, much like Spotify’s Daily Mixes. I can see that they’ll be worth a listen, and it makes sense to split them up this way.
The New Music mix is the make-or-break playlist for me though. Spotify’s Discover Weekly introduced me to lots of new music over the years and although I think it got a bit samey of late it’s the playlist I most look forward to each week. The New Music mix is going to find it a tough act to follow.
And it’s…interesting. Not a total disaster anyway.
Let’s get the bad stuff out of the way first: there’s much too much EDM & US chart in it, which I was expecting. The reason Apple Music has never seen me play a Taylor Swift track is not because I’ve never heard of Taylor Swift, it’s because I mostly don’t like her stuff. But I do understand that I’m going to have to teach it that — there’s no way I can reasonably expect it to know that my love of Amtrac or The Midnight makes me an unlikely Taylor Swift fan. So time to get busy with the “dislike” button, even though using it makes me feel just a little bit guilty.
On the positive side, there are a couple of gems in there. Tracks I’ve never heard from artists I’ve never heard of. Actually a bit left-field and, dare I say it, choices that I don’t think Spotify would have made. So not a complete disaster, and presumably it’s only going to get better from here.
Day 45: Wrap-up
Another couple of weeks have passed. My New Music mixes are getting slightly better, but not as quick as I’d have liked. And every so often you get some really batshit crazy stuff cropping up in there. Folk music? Seriously? How many Hip-Hop tracks do I have to dislike before you stop recommending it, Apple?
But overall it’s doing its job of introducing me to new stuff. I find I approach it with greater trepidation than I did with Spotify’s Discover Weekly but that’s because it takes me out of my comfort zone more often.
Other things I wish I’d known at the start:
- If you can save a few £ by moving to Apple Music then do it. It’s not better or worse than Spotify, it’s just different. You’ll get used to it.
- On your first day, learn what Apple Music does when you “love” a song. It’s different to Spotify, and you need to understand this.
- Get Playlisty. Get MusicHarbor. Both are great for music discovery and I’m now hooked on the former’s seamless access to Beatport charts (if you like electronic music you’ll love Beatport).
- If you have issues, after Google the Apple Music subreddit is your best port of call.
Unless something drastic happens with Spotify’s pricing, I’m now well set for several more seasons of Ted Lasso.
