Switching From Spotify to Apple Music Is Easy—But It’s Not That Easy.

My Spotify playlists indicate that I’ve been adding tracks to them since 2013. I’ve been using the streamer for longer than I was consistently on Facebook, and longer than I’ve been on Instagram, Snapchat or Twitter. After 12 years, a certain amount of inertia sets in. If it’s worked fine for more than a decade, why change? Inertia, and commitment, in the form of a playlist, album and song library that’s built up year on year.

The hassle of trying to reconstruct all that on a different platform was always the practical counterweight to all the anti-Spotify arguments: its miserly payments to artists; its encouragement of bland sonic conformity; its seemingly lax attitude to AI-generated slop music clogging up playlists. Opposition has taken a more sharply political shape recently, with acts including Massive Attack and Godspeed You! Black Emperor pulling their catalogues from Spotify in protest of founder Daniel Ek’s investment in the military tech company Helsing. A series of talks called “Death to Spotify” was held this month in California, during which indie musicians discussed how to carve out a career without the platform.

But if I’m honest with myself, all these moral considerations were overshadowed by Apple Music’s recent introduction of a feature that lets users of other streamers copy over their music libraries. Apple Music is usually thought of as the alternative-in-waiting to Spotify. And what better time than now to make an aggressive play for disillusioned Spotify users who need a painless way of disengaging?

So, a few weeks ago, I ended 12 years of consistent Spotify use and swapped to Apple Music. The library copying, powered by a third-party service called Songshift, went as well as you could hope for, with 9,480 songs, 760 albums and 41 playlists smoothly carried over. Then I was presented with a list of what songs couldn’t be, and the ones with alternate versions on Apple Music to pick between. Both lists were mostly filled with niche, dance-orientated stuff—songs by the likes of Blessed Madonna or Vegyn—and nothing especially notable by its absence.

And then—well, at this point, it’s worth saying that major music streaming platforms are very similar to each other. They’re competing to provide the same service to customers, after all. So there was no moment of revelation, no Where have you been all my life feeling. There were good details and bad details.