Google Play Music is going away. I’ve been a subscriber for a number of years and I liked the service but they are changing it to YouTube Music which I don’t like as much. So I decided to make a change to Spotify. People seem to really like Spotify and I like that they have a Linux client and a decent family plan ($15 per month).
All good. Except that I’ve got years of playlists on Google Play Music that I’d like to bring along. Some internet searching showed that there are some commercial tools for doing this (most notably Soundiiz). However, I know that Spotify has an API and it seems like an interesting thing to do, so I’m going to roll my own.
The first step is exporting all of my existing stuff using Google Takeout. The process of creating the download isn’t hard but the results are sort of weird. It all comes down in .zip files and is a series of CSV and MP3 files with the tracks organized into folders for the playlists. It would be easier if it was a big CSV for each playlist with each song, but whatever.
Anyway, I’ve got the data now and will take a look at my options for uploading the playlists into Spotify. It should be an interesting little project.