Last year, I had the unfortunate experience of losing all my playlists when I switched from Apple Music to Spotify. Playlists are important to me. They are snapshots of a moment in my life. Maybe there was a particular soundtrack to the summer of 2016. But traditionally, music streaming services don’t make it easy to take your playlists to another platform.
So you can imagine how excited Apple Music was to see that the Data Transfer Initiative (DTI), a group formed by Apple, Google, and Meta to create data portability tools, had created a new playlist transfer tool. European digital market law requires these designated “gatekeepers” to fund transfer tools as part of a broader remedies against Big Tech’s strategy of locking users into their platforms.
Finally! But there was one big problem. The tool was not compatible with Spotify, the world’s most popular music service. Spotify seems to have failed to catch the data portability wave (or maybe the regulators didn’t tell them to). DTI’s tool only transfers between Apple Music and YouTube Music, so it’s not very useful for most people.
Chris Riley, DTI’s executive director, is also fed up with Big Tech’s lock-in policies. He has been pushing for more companies to come to the table and make their services more portable.
“We’ve just been stuck in this world for the last 10 years, feeling trapped,” Riley told TechCrunch. “I don’t think enough people know that this is what it’s supposed to be.”
Acknowledging the limitations of DTI, Riley suggested I use a free third-party tool called Soundiiz to transfer my playlists from Apple Music to Spotify. Instead of working directly with streaming services, Soundiiz builds portability tools using existing APIs and acts as a translator between services. In a matter of minutes, I was able to connect my account, transfer my playlists, and start listening to my old Apple Music playlists on Spotify. It was easy and fun.
Soundiiz lets you transfer playlists between Apple Music, Spotify, YouTube Music, Amazon Music, Tidal, Deezer, SoundCloud, and 20 other streaming services I’ve never heard of. It has a simple user interface where you connect your streaming services and choose which playlists to transfer, including playlists created by other people.
The story of Soundiiz explains why it works so well and cheaply. In 2013, two French friends, Thomas Magnano and Benoit Herbreteau, loved listening to music while coding together. At night, they started building a music search interface that took input from all over the web. In the process, they created a useful tool.
They didn’t create a music search interface, but the playlist transfer tool became Soundiiz.
“I had to fiddle with APIs and test matches between services. While I was doing that, I was creating playlists and moving them between services, just internally,” Magnano told TechCrunch. “I introduced this feature to a colleague, and we were like, ‘Oh, this is useful for me. Maybe it’ll be useful for other people.’”
In 2015, Soundiiz had a huge success when it partnered with Jay-Z’s music service Tidal. The music platform wanted to make it easier for people to leave Spotify and join Tidal with all the same playlists, and Soundiiz helped them do that. But Magnano says Tidal allowed people to export playlists as well as import them, which is something that all the music service APIs they work with require.
Since then, more people have started using the service, and the creators have made Soundiiz their full-time job, but they have maintained their value. The two founders make a living from Soundiiz, but they told TechCrunch, “We don’t want to get rich.” Magnano said Soundiiz has never taken outside investment to lower its price, and the founders have maintained control of the project.
However, the free Soundiiz has its limitations. It truncates some of the longer playlists (up to 200 songs). Also, you have to transfer the playlists one by one, and each takes about a minute, so transferring 12 playlists can take a while. Soundiiz offers a premium plan ($4.50 per month, cancelable after transfer) to address these limitations.
The two founders are the only employees at Soundiiz, but they have grown quite a bit. Soundiiz has helped millions of people send over 220 million playlists over the past 10 years. According to Magnano, they have never spent a penny on marketing, but they didn’t have to.
“If you Googled ‘how to transfer Deezer to Spotify’ in 2012, there were no answers,” Magnano said. “So when Soundiiz came out, it was the first result on Google, and we’ve maintained a good SEO ranking ever since.”
Magnano says Spotify has more to lose than to win by creating a playlist transfer tool like Apple and Google, and he doesn’t expect that to change anytime soon. But he says all of these streaming services know what Soundiiz does and are okay with it. Some even promote it in their FAQs. That said, it’s unlikely any of them will promote a playlist transfer service like Soundiiz any further than that.
