SongShift lets users simply transfer libraries and playlists between streaming services. Spotify are revoking SongShift’s ability to transfer out.

SongShift allows users to keep their library and playlists intact when moving from one streaming platform to another such as Apple Music, Spotify, YouTube, Pandora and Tidal. SongShift can also be used by curators to easily manage public playlists across services.

Unfortunately, as of SongShift v5.1.2, you will no longer be able to create transfers from Spotify to another music service. We understand this will be a disappointment for a lot of you. We wish we didn’t have to.

Why then?
The Spotify Developer Platform Team reached out and let us know we’d need to remove transferring from their service to a competing music service or have our API access revoked due to TOS violation. While this is not the news we wanted to hear, we respect their decision.

The SongShift Team

Spotify have managed to achieve the best of both worlds here. While Spotify are continuing to allow SongShift to use their API so users can easily transfer music to Spotify, they are demanding SongShift don’t allow users to transfer music out of Spotify. “To continue to provide some level of support for Spotify, we’ll still be supporting transferring from other services to Spotify.” Spotify are yet to comment on the situation.

It can seen how locking in your users by disabling transfer to competitors is beneficial for Spotify, but can back-fire once more services follow suit, thus making transfer in also impossible. Spotify are setting a dangerous precedent here from the company that fought against Apple’s closed eco-system.

We recently looked at a similar service from FreeYourMusic. FreeYourMusic have commended on the situation, however as they ditched Spotify’s API after facing similar issues, they aren’t bound to Spotify’s terms of services and will continue to work.