Spotify to Apple Music: A Tested Migration

Price or sound quality rarely keeps someone on Spotify against their better judgment. Years of playlists do. Before switching, I ran an actual migration with two of the most-used transfer tools and tracked exactly what survived and what didn't.

TL;DR

TuneMyMusic's free tier transfers up to 500 tracks per transfer; Soundiiz's free tier moves one playlist at a time, capped at 200 tracks per playlist, with no batch transfer or liked-songs sync until you pay.
Regular playlists transfer with a real but incomplete match rate — remixes, regional-only releases, and live versions are the tracks most likely to fail to auto-match.
Playlist order generally survives the move; collaborative-playlist metadata (who added what) does not.
Podcasts and podcast "likes" never transfer — Apple Podcasts is a separate app from Apple Music entirely, and neither transfer tool touches it.
Budget roughly an hour of manual fixing for a library of a few hundred songs; more for a larger one.

KEY-STAT: 500 — Tracks per transfer on TuneMyMusic's free tier — the practical ceiling before you're paying or splitting the job into batches

What actually transfers, tested

I ran my own Spotify library — a mix of standard playlists, a couple of collaborative ones, and my liked songs — through both TuneMyMusic and Soundiiz to see what came out the other side on Apple Music.

Item	TuneMyMusic (free)	Soundiiz (free)
Standard playlists	Transferred, most tracks matched	Transferred, one playlist at a time
Playlist track order	Preserved	Preserved
Liked songs	Transferred as a playlist	Not included on free tier — requires Premium
Collaborative playlists	Transferred, contributor info lost	Transferred, contributor info lost
Podcasts / podcast likes	Did not transfer	Did not transfer
Unmatched tracks	Flagged in a report after the run	Flagged per playlist during the run

The two tools I used, and their real free-tier limits

TuneMyMusic's free plan caps a transfer at 500 tracks — enough for most single libraries, but you'll need to split a bigger collection into multiple runs or pay for the unlimited tier. Soundiiz's free plan works differently: it moves one playlist at a time, capped at 200 tracks per playlist, with no batch-transfer option and no favorite-tracks (liked songs) syncing until you upgrade to Premium. Neither is an official Spotify or Apple tool — both are third-party services that connect to each app's API with your permission.

Note

Because neither tool syncs live, a transfer is a one-time snapshot. Anything you add to Spotify after running the migration won't appear on Apple Music unless you run the transfer again.

What breaks: match failures, podcasts, and playlist order

Playlist order held up well on both tools — songs landed in the sequence I'd built them in. What didn't hold up as cleanly was track matching: a meaningful chunk of tracks failed to auto-match, concentrated almost entirely in a few categories — DJ remixes and mashups not officially released as singles, region-locked releases available on one service but not the other, and live or alternate versions where the tool matched the studio version instead (or found nothing at all). Both tools flag these as "not found" or "low confidence match" rather than silently dropping them, which at least makes the cleanup list findable.

Warning

Podcasts and podcast episode "likes" do not transfer with either tool, and never will through this route — Apple Podcasts is a completely separate app from Apple Music, with its own subscription and library system. If podcasts matter to you, you'll be resubscribing manually inside Apple Podcasts, not migrating anything.

Collaborative playlists transferred as playlists, but the metadata of who contributed which track didn't carry over — everything lands attributed to whoever ran the transfer. If that history matters to your group, it's worth noting before you migrate, not after.

Step-by-step: the actual migration process

Create accounts on the transfer tool and authorize both Spotify and Apple Music (read access to Spotify, write access to Apple Music).
Start with your liked songs as a standalone playlist first — it's easier to verify than mixed in with everything else.
Run your regular playlists next, one batch at a time if you're near the free-tier track limit.
Open the unmatched-tracks report immediately after each run — the tool's confidence in a "no match" is usually right, but double-check anything marked "low confidence" before assuming it's correct.
Manually search Apple Music for anything flagged as unmatched; most of the remixes and live versions I couldn't auto-match were still findable by hand within a minute or two each.
Re-check playlist order and collaborative-playlist membership last, since these are the details a quick glance can miss.

Should you keep both apps running during the switch?

Yes, at least until you've verified the migration. Keep Spotify active — free tier is enough — for a week or two after the transfer so you can cross-check anything that looks off on Apple Music against the original. Since neither transfer tool syncs live, there's no risk of double-charges from running both temporarily; the only cost is not cancelling Spotify Premium a few weeks earlier than you technically had to.

The bottom line

Migration works, but "transfer" understates the manual cleanup involved. For a library of a few hundred songs, budget roughly an hour to review the unmatched-tracks report and manually fix the handful of remixes, live versions, or region-locked tracks that won't auto-match — a bigger library scales that time up, not down. Playlist order survives; podcasts and collaborative-playlist credit don't. If that tradeoff is acceptable, the price and audio-quality comparisons in our full Spotify vs Apple Music guide are the next thing worth checking before you commit, alongside the cost breakdown and sound-quality test already in this series.

Frequently asked questions

Does Apple Music keep your liked songs from Spotify?

Yes, but not automatically — a transfer tool like TuneMyMusic can move your Spotify liked songs into Apple Music as a playlist. Soundiiz's free tier doesn't include favorite-tracks syncing at all; that requires its paid plan.

What is the best free tool to transfer Spotify playlists to Apple Music?

TuneMyMusic's free tier (up to 500 tracks per transfer) is the more generous option for a single migration. Soundiiz's free tier works one playlist at a time with a 200-track cap per playlist and no liked-songs support, making it better suited to moving a handful of playlists rather than a full library.

Do podcasts transfer from Spotify to Apple Music?

No. Podcasts live in a completely separate app on Apple's side (Apple Podcasts, not Apple Music), and neither TuneMyMusic nor Soundiiz moves podcast subscriptions or episode likes. You'll need to resubscribe to shows manually.

How long does it take to migrate a Spotify library to Apple Music?

The transfer itself runs in minutes. The real time cost is manual cleanup — expect roughly an hour to review unmatched tracks and fix the handful that won't auto-match for a library of a few hundred songs, scaling up for a larger collection.

Can I transfer playlists back from Apple Music to Spotify later?

Yes, the same tools work in both directions. Keep in mind any manual fixes you made after the first migration (matching remixes, fixing unmatched tracks) won't automatically carry over — a return trip is effectively a fresh migration with the same match-rate limitations.