How can I keep the order when importing Spotify “Liked Songs” to Apple Music “Songs”?

We get asked this a lot by people migrating from Spotify to Apple Music.

Short answer: You can’t. If you want to keep the order you must use a playlist.

Long answer: You’re asking the wrong question!

Unsurprisingly a lot of new Apple Music users assume that the Songs section of their Apple Music library is equivalent to the “Liked Songs” section of Spotify. Because people spend a lot of time on their Liked Songs list and want that replicated in Apple Music, keeping the order is a natural thing to ask for.

Unfortunately the Songs section in Apple Music is not remotely the same thing as Liked Songs in Spotify. It’s simply a song by song view of everything in your library including albums and potentially playlist tracks. It has no inherent order (it’s a view on a database) but you can apply a sort to it, if you so wish. It’s actually a hangover from iTunes, circa 2002.

To be clear: once you’ve been using Apple Music for a short while that “Songs” view will become a dumpster fire of seemingly random tracks. You can minimise this by turning off “Add playlist songs” and “Add favourite songs” in Settings (everyone we know does this) but every track from every album you add to your library will still appear in that Songs list. It will never be the nice, clean view of your favourite tracks that you had on Spotify.

The right question to ask is: Can Playlisty add my Spotify “Liked Songs” to Apple Music’s “Favourite Songs”?

The Apple Music “Favourite Songs” playlist is the closest equivalent to Spotify “Liked Songs” and it does retain the order of your tracks. Unfortunately Apple don’t yet give us a reliable way to add to “Favourite Songs” from Playlisty, so sadly the answer to this question is currently “No” but as soon as Apple give us a way the answer will be “Yes”.

In the mean time the best thing to do is to copy your “Liked Songs” to a playlist. Optionally you could then “Favourite” the songs from there, to add them to your “Favourite Songs” list manually.