Unfortunately, there are no in-built means of exporting one of your playlists from Spotify. Spotify doesn’t want you to be able to reproduce their custom-made playlists elsewhere (understandably), and so blanket refuses you the ability to export any playlists, even if they are your own.
This wasn’t always the case, and early users of Spotify will remember being able to import and export playlists to and from other streaming or music playing services. It is now, however, near-impossible. Thankfully, there are still a few options open to you.
Since we cannot offer you a straightforward tutorial on how to export a Spotify playlist, we think it will be most beneficial to talk you through some FAQs, which may still answer your questions and point you in the right direction.
Table of Contents
Frequently asked questions
Why would I want to export a Spotify playlist?
Spotify – one of the world’s favorite music streaming services – allows you to customize and curate your own playlists, or even to collaborate on a playlist with your friends. Furthermore, the app hosts positively thousands of AI-generated playlists and playlists curated by the Spotify team themselves. As such, many users feel a deep attachment to their playlists.
If you were wanting to listen to a Spotify playlist on iTunes, say, or on some other music streaming service – or indeed if you were looking to fill your phone, iPod, or MP3 player with the music from that playlist – you’re probably looking to export the Spotify playlist. You might think of exporting it as a text document, or a spreadsheet, or an actual MP3 file. Any form of export would enable you to transfer the playlist’s credentials outside of Spotify.
Unfortunately, it is not possible to export a Spotify playlist using the native tools
Why does Spotify not allow you to export a playlist?
Spotify is a business, and like all businesses, it’s precious about its intellectual property. As far as Spotify sees it, part of the premium service it offers its users is access to an extensive library of customized, highly-curated playlists (think of the ‘This is…’ and ‘[ARTIST] Radio’ playlists). The last thing Spotify as a business wants is for people to be able to take these playlists and export them outside the Spotify app. Doing so would devalue their service.
Unfortunately, what this means is that the blocker put on exporting Spotify playlists also applies to your own playlists. Kind of silly, we know, but the truth nonetheless. It may also be because Spotify feels it owns part of your playlists, given that you used Spotify tools to curate them.
What’s the best way around this?
There are a few ways around this, but no native tools exist to do the job. Essentially, you’ve got to resort to an external app – there’s just simply no other way to export a playlist from Spotify.
Here are three external apps for exporting playlists as text files, spreadsheets, and even exporting MP3s of the songs themselves.
Music Backuper – this free-to-use software exports Spotify playlists as a JSON backup file
Exportify – another free tool that exports Spotify playlists and saves them as CSV files
Tune My Music – inarguably the best free tool we’ve found, Tune My Music allows you to actually move playlists from Spotify to almost any other streaming/listening app, as well as allowing you to export Spotify playlists as text files. There is a free and paid version of the app.
I don’t want to export a playlist, I just want to copy/duplicate it, how do I do that?
It may be the case that you thought you needed to export a playlist, but having read this far now realize you just meant you needed to copy or duplicate a playlist. Maybe you’re wanting to combine several playlists, or wish to split one playlist into two.
Whatever your reason, doing so is easy. Open up Spotify and locate the playlist you wish to duplicate. You’ll have to do this on a computer if you want to do it in one go. First, right-click on the name of the playlist in the sidebar, and from the pop-up menu, select ‘Create similar playlist’. Your playlist will be immediately duplicated and can now be found at the top of your playlists list under the title ‘[PLAYLIST TITLE] (2)’.
If you only have Spotify on your phone, then unfortunately in order to duplicate a playlist you’re going to have to first create a new playlist, and then add each song from the original playlist into this new one, one at a time.
