This post is part of my series “get your stuff organized, for the god sake!”
The past 10 years, more and more subscriptions services popped up. Most of them cheap and useful, but every year there’s a new subscription service “needed”. I lost track of how many subscription we have and decided to sum them.
It’s a lot, more than 10 subscription. Although they are cheap, together they are quite expensive. So I decided to list and clean the unnecessary ones.
Spotify is the first one that we decided to cancel.
Youtube Premium
Ricardo hates Youtube ads, he even stopped using the service. The launch of Youtube Premium was a must-have. Nowadays we have a family subscription.
The good news is that Youtube Premium comes with Youtube Music. Before that, we already had subscribed to Spotify and were satisfied with it’s catalog and app. We decided to keep them both.
Youtube Music is not as good as Spotify but it’s included. This year, we decided to evaluate which subscription is more important. Youtube Premium won, not because of Youtube Music, but because it prevent the pain of watching Youtube Ads.
But how to leave Spotify? I have 117 playlist (created and saved) and I’m quite happy with them. If I could easily migrate them…
The pain of migration
Canceling Spotify is easy. No more than a few buttons pushed on it’s Subscription page. On the other hand, exporting your playlists are not.
Spotify has API so I thought that someone must have created some app to access and export your playlists. Let’s start googling.
I found many softwares and services that promised exporting your playlists. I avoided the paid ones and looked for those that have its code open sourced.
I found Exportify. It was the easiest way that I found to solve my problem.
Exportify export your playlists to CVS and the entire application runs in the browser, so there’s no need of signing up or anything else. You can also check its code on Github and use it at watsonbox.github.io/exportify, so you don’t need to install it.
The next part is to understand which format does Youtube Music require to import your playlist. Oh, wait, Youtube Music CAN’T IMPORT your playlists.
Youtube Music can’t import playlists
Yes, that’s right. It can’t import playlist. It also doesn’t have a “computer” app, you must use your browser to access the service and it’s painful, truly painful, to create and populate your playlist.
But does it have an API that can be used to import playlists? Yes, it does. On Google I found the ytmusicapi, an “unofficial API for YouTube Music” and pytuber, a “cli tool to manage your music playlists on youtube“, but I didn’t try them.
I plan to try ytmusicapi and pytuber later to automate importing 100 playlist, but for now, I created 3 playlist manually on Youtube Music.
It’s incredible how Youtube Music didn’t implemented a simple “upload your playlist” service and we need to use an alternative way. If there were no money involved, I surely would give up and come back to Spotify, but for the time being I’ll keep trying to use Youtube Music.
Tags: digital life