Switching from Spotify to Apple Music

I had mentioned last November that my family was considering a switch from Spotify to Apple Music. Soon afterwards, we did it. It took some planning, but here’s how we accomplished that – making Apple Music an even better experience than Spotify was for us.

Why we did it

So, first thing: we all switched away for different reasons. There are plenty to choose from, but for us, it was a combination of the price increases, ICE ads, and fake AI artists. Artists like Massive Attack are removing their music from Spotify altogether. Additionally, Spotify cares about where you’re physically located when sharing a family plan, but Apple does not.

I had also grown frustrated with how long Spotify had taken to support native iOS and macOS features – things like Notification Center on the Mac or Siri were difficult to use with Spotify. I found aging feature requests that just weren’t being addressed – some of them had even been closed, and users were encouraged to open new ones. This unfairly reset the clock for features that people like me had been requesting for a decade or longer.

Lastly, after several redesigns over the years, I noticed that Spotify’s homepage only suggested music I had just listened to. I found myself cycling through the same music repeatedly. For a service that had years and years of data on what I liked, it was maddening to continue to listen to the same 5 albums each time I opened the app. I wanted to see what things looked like on the other side.

Getting started

The first step was deciding which service we were going to switch to. There are several out there, but the conclusion I came to was that Apple Music was the closest competitor to Spotify in terms of features and library size. I wasn’t looking for a completely different experience and didn’t want to rethink my approach to listening to music. We’re also an all-Apple household for obvious reasons, so you might have different considerations if you use Android or Windows devices.

We started with free trials of Apple Music. I had a 3 month trial because I had purchased a new iPhone, and Joyce had one because she upgraded her AirPods. I wanted some overlap between both services, so I could freely explore if this was even a good idea. I set up an Apple Music account and started listening to music. It struggled to determine what kind of music I liked, which is understandable. I realized I needed to train it.

Prior to Spotify, I had a massive music library in the iTunes app on the Mac. When I switched to Spotify in the mid-2010s, there was no migration tool. I had to rebuild everything from the beginning in Spotify. I followed artists I liked, saved albums I liked from artists I didn’t want to follow, and built up a number of playlists. This time, I wanted to move all of that to Apple Music.

Performing the migration

It turns out that Apple pays SongShift (a third party developer) to assist with migrating to Apple Music. A bunch of services are supported, including Spotify. While SongShift normally requires payment, you can use it for free, as long as your destination is Apple Music.

I found that I had paid for the standalone SongShift app at some point in the past, so I used that in addition to the free migration tool. It was very kind of them to honor my old license, even as they’ve moved to a subscription model.

For the most part, the migration worked well. Almost all of my songs from Spotify matched to songs in Apple Music. Great! A lot of my playlists moved over, too. However, I noticed a few issues:

• Artists I followed on Spotify didn’t translate to favorited artists on Apple Music
• Songs I liked on Spotify didn’t translate to favorited songs on Apple Music
• Playlists created by Spotify didn’t copy at all

Let’s start with the last one. It turns out there’s an easy workaround for that – create your own playlists, name them identically if you’d like, and copy your songs from the Spotify-owned playlists to your manually-created ones. For example, make your own empty Repeat Rewind playlist, switch to your Spotify-created Repeat Rewind playlist, select all, and drag them to your custom playlist. Run SongShift, transfer, done.

For Liked Songs, do the same thing, but when the playlist lands in Apple Music, select all of the songs and mark them as favorites. You can delete the Liked Songs playlist after that – they’ll all show up in the new Favorite Songs playlist instead.

For artists I followed in Spotify, I couldn’t find a way to automatically “favorite” them in Apple Music. On my Mac, I opened the Spotify and the Music apps, then used Command-Tab to switch between them. I manually searched for each artist in the Music app and marked them as a favorite.

After that, Apple Music’s suggestions got significantly better. I found the Apple Music homepage more frequently had better suggestions about what I’d like. It’s not perfect, but neither was Spotify. I’m happy with it.

Joyce took a different approach: she wanted to start from scratch. One afternoon, she built her new standing desk and listened to several playlists of popular songs using Apple Music. She favorited everything that she liked. Although it required some work, she’s very happy with how that turned out.

Differences worth noting

Something to consider is that Spotify and Apple Music have different ways of organizing your library. I couldn’t find a decent explanation anywhere that detailed the differences in plain English, so I’ll try.

In general, any song that you add to a playlist is part of your “library.” If you favorite a song, it’s now part of your library. If you favorite an artist, they’re also in your library, but you might see songs listed under them because they exist in a playlist that you’ve created. I’m still not totally on board with it, but I’ve learned to ignore quirks like that. Browsing an artist’s work on Apple Music requires an extra tap each time, which is annoying, and I hope they revisit the interface in the future.

Beyond that, there are nice improvements that have made it worth switching. If you’re listening to a playlist, Apple Music adds a crossfade between songs that’s actually pretty great. I’ve heard it merge songs that shouldn’t work together, but they do. I never liked crossfades before, but lately I’ve come to appreciate them when they’re done well.

Our house is full of Sonos speakers, so compatibility with those is important to us. Adding our Apple Music accounts to Sonos was easy. Using the Sonos app to play music…well, it works. I tend to prefer using the native Spotify or Music apps to stream music, though.

If you’re familiar with Spotify Connect, it’s pretty good – you open the Spotify app, pick something you want to listen to, and pick a speaker to play it from. From there, the speaker talks directly to Spotify. You can even leave the room and it’ll keep playing.

Apple Music works differently. The Music app streams via AirPlay 2, so your iPhone must be nearby at all times. If I’m listening to music in the basement, then walk upstairs to get something, I need to decide if I’m leaving my phone in the basement or stopping the music to bring my phone with me. Additionally, I had to factory reset every Sonos speaker to properly add it to HomeKit, since AirPlay 2 relies on the speaker names and room assignments (and I blew up our HomeKit home last year).

That said, using Siri is great. Both of these phrases work exactly as you’d want them to:

• “Hey Siri, play some Nine Inch Nails in the living room” (note: there are 3 speakers and a subwoofer in the living room – it’ll play on all of them)
• “Hey Siri, play something I’d like in the kitchen and dining room” (note: there are 3 speakers across both of these rooms, and “something I’d like” is a seemingly vague request that it will absolutely honor)

And of course, the standard Siri phrases I used with Spotify still work:

• “Hey Siri, pause the music” (or “Hey Siri, stop the music”)
• “Hey Siri, play the music” (if I had paused it while it was playing something)
• “Hey Siri, skip this song”

Since AirPlay can tell which speakers are nearby, when you open the Music app on your phone, it’ll immediately suggest you stream to a nearby speaker, especially if you’ve used it before. Those suggestions show up in the Dynamic Island. So, if I’m in the kitchen, it’ll suggest the kitchen and dining room speakers, and if I’m in the living room, it’ll suggest those speakers.

Sadly, despite Apple’s excellent Continuity features that have seen continuous improvements over the years, the Music app on the macOS is still iTunes under the hood, while the Music app for iOS appears to be fully rebuilt. Spotify allows you to seamlessly control your music from any device, including macOS and iOS, but that’s just not possible with Apple Music.

So, if I’m listening to music downstairs with my iPhone, and I pause and walk upstairs to my office, I cannot bring up the Music app on my Mac and pick up where I left off. The Mac app has no idea what I was doing with my iPhone. I hope this improves in the future, but I suspect it’s this way because Apple continues to support so many legacy features with the app that used to be iTunes (and SoundJam MP before that). Did you know you can still buy music from the iTunes Music Store?

Oh, and if you’re sad about being left out of Spotify Wrapped, that’s fair. Apple Music doesn’t exactly do the same thing. They do not have personalized messages from the artists you listened to, which I’ll miss. However, they feature playlists of your top songs throughout the year, and just like Spotify, you can save them to your library. I think they provide something you can share to social media, too. It’s close enough for me.

Subscription notes

Sharing the Apple Music family subscription required some planning of its own. To share an Apple Music subscription, everyone needs to be part of a Family Sharing group. There are some complications with this:

• You need to make decisions about who’s going to be the family organizer, how you’re going to handle purchase sharing, iCloud storage, etc.
• If people are part of a separate Family Sharing group, they’ll need to leave that group to join yours
  • While you can only be a member of one Family Sharing group at a time, you’re limited to joining two in a single year
• If you want to share any subscription, you must share it with everyone
• A family is limited to 6 people total

Up until this point, Joyce and I had our own family sharing group. We enabled purchase sharing so we could share our paid iOS apps. We also shared our iCloud storage plan. It worked out to be less expensive than having two individual iCloud subscriptions.

When adding more family members to our Family Sharing group, we had to disable purchase sharing (so apps someone else purchases aren’t billed to our credit card). We left iCloud sharing enabled, but we had to make sure we had enough storage to cover anyone else that didn’t want to maintain their own iCloud subscription.

We briefly considered Apple One, but we wouldn’t use all of the services, and the cost increase didn’t make sense for us. With Spotify’s constant price increases, we actually saved money by switching to Apple Music, so it didn’t make sense to throw those savings back at Apple.

Augmenting streaming services

One thing to note is that before switching from iTunes to Spotify, I had a large library of music (mostly ripped from CDs, which I have stubbornly kept despite the storage concerns). At first, I considered deleting it all, but held off – and I’m glad I did. A lot of music is still missing from streaming services like Spotify or Apple Music.

Since I already use Plex for streaming video, it was pretty simple to copy my old iTunes library to my home server and add it to Plex. It recognized the file/folder organization and immediately fetched all of the correct metadata. This way, if I want to listen to something that’s unavailable on a streaming service, I can use Plexamp to stream it from home.

I’ve considered using iTunes Match to add missing songs to my Apple Music library (confusingly, it’s included but also available as its own subscription), but Plexamp works just fine.

Conclusion

In the end, I’m glad we did this. We saved a bit of money and got a (mostly) better experience. It took some work and a lot of research, but I managed to make my Apple Music experience even better than Spotify.