Apple Music opens a garden gate to YouTube Music

Apple has built an attractive little gate in its walled garden, introducing a way to share Apple Music playlists with YouTube Music.

A little garden gate

This has been sort of possible using third party services, but Apple has now made it much easier. That’s possibly another element to its set of responses to regulatory pressure to open up parts of its business.

Such speculation aside, the new Apple Music tool makes it pretty easy to transfer your playlists, though you do need your own active Apple Music or iTunes Match subscription to make it work.

It’s not that straightforward a process, at least, not yet.

How to export Apple Music playlists to YouTube Music

To export the list you must:

Have an active Apple Music or iTunes Match subscription.
You also require an active YouTube Music account.
Visit Apple’s Data and Privacy page.
Tap Request to transfer a copy of your data.
Choose Apple Music playlists.
Follow the steps described.
Apple sends email notifications to the email addresses associated with your Apple ID account.
You will receive an email that the transfer is complete.
The playlists then appear in the Library tab in YouTube Music.
Missing songs may not be available in YouTube Music, and if you update a playlists subsequent to making the request the update won’t be transferred.

What you can transfer

Only the playlists that you’ve created (including collaborative playlists that you own) are transferred – the music files themselves are not. Playlists can include only songs available on YouTube Music. If your playlists contains other audio files — such as podcasts, audio books, or user-uploaded audio files — they won’t be transferred.

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