Ah, inertia: The internet’s favorite force. It might not be able to move mountains—on account of, basically, being the exact reason you can’t actually do that—but the physical/psychological force that can be best summed up as “Fuck it, I don’t want to move” can still have massive effects on online ecosystems. Which is why it feels especially sneaky—and dare we say it, even savvy—that Apple made a move this week to help Spotify users overcome any latent desires they might have to bail on the rival music streaming service.
Specifically, Resident Advisor reports on a recent change the tech giant made to how users can import playlists into its Apple Music service, including, critically, the ability to take existing playlists from its competitors and gobble them up for itself. The feature has been beta-testing in Australia and New Zealand for a while now, but has now been rolled out in numerous major markets, including the United States. Just like that, users can abandon, say, Spotify—to pick one massive competitor that a lot of people have stuck with because it’d be too much of a hassle to leave—without also abandoning years’ worth of their Spotify playlists. (Whether moving to Apple represents an upward trajectory or more of a lateral move is left as an exercise for the reader, but the option is certainly nice.)
There are, after all, an increasingly varied list of reasons that both artists and users have been drifting out of Spotify’s orbit in recent months. Take the fiscal: Songwriters have stated that they’ve been getting screwed on royalties lately, after Spotify altered its payout structure (something it’s apparently hoping to address with a new deal with indie publisher Kobalt). Or the political, as a number of artists have protested CEO Daniel Ek’s strong ties to Prima Materia, an investment fund that’s raised more than a half a billion dollars for AI military drone company Helsing. Or even just the very basic “Why are you doing this instead of just making shit easier and cheaper to use?” factor, like the company’s recent announcement that it’s going to incorporate in-app messaging tools into the platform. The point is that there’s a diverse coalition of folks who might be looking for a path out of SpotifyLand—and Apple just cheerfully oiled the hinges of a possible escape hatch.
