You have a music streaming service on your iPhone, don’t you? Chances are you do, and most likely it will be either Spotify or Apple Music, though it could be Amazon Music or Tidal, among others. Whichever it is, changing services has always been a pain: you can’t take your library—and more important, your playlists—with you. This may be about to change.
According to 9to5Mac, there is evidence that Apple is testing a new feature which will allow users to import songs and playlists to the Apple Music library from a rival streaming service.
I’ve lost count of how many times I’ve heard people say they’d like to switch from service A to service B but they won’t because they’d lose all their playlists and carefully curated library. There are different features available on the various services, such as a bigger classical library, more high-resolution audio files and more. But losing those playlists is enough to stop people switching.
There are services that can do this transfer for you, and one of them is SongShift. And that name comes up in the details that are appearing now, suggesting that Apple may be working with SongShift.
Right now, the references to the feature appear in the latest Apple Music beta for Android (and MacRumors has independently verified that the Android Package Kit contains them).
However, if this feature makes it beyond beta, it is inconceivable that it won’t be introduced to the iPhone as well: would Apple users be happy if their friends with Android phones had better features than they did?
The reference reads, “Select a Music Service. Choose a service and transfer your library and playlists you made over to Apple Music.” There’s a picture of an empty app icon and an arrow pointing towards the Apple Music icon. It’s a one-way street, then. The text goes on, “Powered by Songshift.”
SongShift is a third-party service which has been helping users move playlists and music libraries around for years, and to Spotify as well as from it, for example.
The Apple Music version is not working yet and not seen by everyone running the beta, so it may be a little way off. Or, since this is a beta, never make it to general release at all.
But it makes a kind of sense, at a time when Apple is opening up the iPhone to third-party app marketplaces and web browsers, that it might like to make it easier for people to switch from Spotify, Amazon Music, Tidal, Deezer or wherever and bring those all-important playlists with them.
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