Why do music services make it easy to import playlists but hard to export them?

Quick answer

Importing brings a service new subscribers, and exporting helps you leave, so services put their effort into the import side. They don't say this outright, but the pattern is easy to see.

Look at what's built in. Spotify added an import inside Your Library that's powered by Tune My Music, and Apple Music has Transfer Music from Other Music Services. Going the other way, Apple's only built-in export sends playlists to YouTube Music and no other service, and Spotify has no export button at all.

What you do get is the data download that privacy law requires. In the EU, GDPR gives you the right to your data in a machine-readable format. Spotify meets this with Download your data on its account privacy page, which includes your playlists as JSON files. That's fine for a backup, but no other service imports those files directly.

There's a technical reason too. A playlist is only a list of song details, and each service has its own catalog, so another service has to match every track. The Data Transfer Initiative calls portability a hard problem for exactly this reason.

The fix is to export with a tool. See our Spotify export guide or the transfer tool roundup.