How to Share Songs Links from Apple Music to Spotify Friends
Ever find a song on one service, and want to share it with your friend on another service? As an Apple Music subscriber, I constantly have to lookup songs on Spotify before sharing them with friends. Sometimes, I have to find the YouTube links for my particularly frugal friends. Fortunately, there are a few easy ways to do this automatically.
Shortcuts via Toolbox Pro
The Shortcuts method is probably the most versatile way. Using Siri Shortcuts can allow you to really customize how you want to share that music link. I like to either copy the link to the clipboard, or share the link to the song directly to the shortcut. Once the link conversion is done, I like a share sheet to pop up automatically, so I can quickly text it to a friend. This can all be easily customized in Shortcuts.
To make this work in Shortcuts, you need an $8 app called Toolbox Pro. This ingenious app adds all sorts of power-user shortcut actions to your Shortcuts app. Fortunately, there’s an action that does exactly what we want to accomplish: Get Links to Song or Album. When passed in a link to a song or album, from any streaming service, it will generate a dictionary full of links to that song or album on other streaming services. Toolbox Pro even includes a shortcut you can import and start using right away.
Opener
If you’re not interested in playing with Shortcuts and automation, there’s an easier way to accomplish this. Opener is an app that handles links and opens them in other apps. The main purpose of Opener is to be able to launch non-default apps via a link URL. For example, if you have a Reddit url you want to open in a third party app, you can open it with Opener, and then Opener will know what to do with it.
Passing a music link to Opener will present you with streaming music app options. If you pass in a Spotify link, and tap the Apple Music option, it will find the song on Apple Music and direct you to the right page in Apple Music. And if you pass in an Apple Music link via sharing, and tap on the Spotify option, you’ll be sent into the Spotify app with the song selected. From there you can use the built-in share options from either app.
Both of these options work great. I personally find myself using Opener more often, due to the cleaner interface and overall satisfying UX. It does add a few more steps, but the simplicity of it is enticing enough for me.
