How to Import a Playlist From Spotify to SoundCloud
The transfer is easy. The disappointment is that the two catalogs barely overlap, and that is by design.
To import a playlist from Spotify to SoundCloud you need an outside tool. SoundCloud has no import button and there is no official route between the two, so every method runs through a third-party transfer service.
The process is the same in all of them: sign in to Spotify, sign in to SoundCloud, pick the playlist, start the transfer. Soundiiz, TuneMyMusic and Songshift are the tools people use.
Expect a poor match rate. A typical commercial playlist transfers somewhere between a third and two thirds of its tracks, and that is not a flaw in the tool.
The two services hold different catalogs on purpose, and the gap is the whole story here.
Understanding why the match rate is low prevents a lot of wasted effort trying different tools.
Spotify's catalog is licensed from labels and distributors. It holds the commercial release of a track: the version the rights holder put out, mastered and cleared.
SoundCloud's catalog is mostly uploaded by the people who made it. Independent releases, remixes, DJ sets, demos, works in progress, and a great deal that no label was ever involved in. Major-label catalog exists there but is far from complete, because for a major release SoundCloud is a promotional surface rather than the distribution channel.
So a playlist of chart pop will transfer badly, because those tracks live on Spotify as the licensed product and appear on SoundCloud only as unofficial uploads that come and go. A playlist of electronic music, hip-hop or anything from independent artists will transfer far better, because that is the material SoundCloud was built for.
Which means the tool is not what determines your result. The genre is. Trying a second transfer service after a disappointing first attempt usually produces the same output, because both are querying the same catalog and getting the same answer.
Running the transfer
Open a transfer service in a browser. Soundiiz and TuneMyMusic are the two with the widest platform coverage; Songshift is an iOS app that does the same job.
Connect Spotify as the source. You will be sent to Spotify's own authorization screen, which is the correct behavior — a tool that asks for your Spotify password directly rather than redirecting you is not one to use.
Connect SoundCloud as the destination, the same way.
Select the playlist, confirm, and wait. The free tiers of these services usually cap how many tracks or playlists you can move at once, which is the only reason to pay for one.
At the end you get a report listing what matched and what did not. Read it. The unmatched list is the useful output, not the success count.
What goes missing and why
Four categories, consistently.
Major-label releases that simply have no SoundCloud presence. Nothing can be done; the track is not there to find.
Tracks that exist on SoundCloud only as unofficial uploads. These match sometimes, and the match is fragile — the upload can be removed by a rights claim weeks later, leaving a gap in your playlist.
Live versions, remasters and regional editions, where the title differs by a parenthetical and the matcher cannot be sure. Most tools err toward not matching, which is the right call.
And anything by an artist whose name is written differently on the two platforms. Featured-artist formatting is the usual culprit.
Fixing the unmatched list by hand
For a playlist you care about, the remaining tracks are worth searching manually, because SoundCloud search behaves differently from Spotify's.
Search the artist rather than the track. SoundCloud's results are heavily weighted toward accounts, and an artist's own profile will contain the official version if one exists, which avoids the unofficial reupload problem entirely.
If only a remix exists, decide deliberately. A remix is a different track, and silently accepting one changes what the playlist is.
And check the upload date on anything that looks right. A ten-year-old upload from an account with no other activity is a reupload, and it will eventually disappear.
Going the other direction
SoundCloud to Spotify is harder and the reason is the same catalog asymmetry in reverse.
A great deal of what people have in SoundCloud playlists has no Spotify equivalent at all: unreleased material, DJ mixes, bootleg remixes. Those are not missing from Spotify by oversight — they could not be licensed there.
The tools will match the commercially released tracks and drop the rest, which often means the character of the playlist is lost even when the count looks acceptable.
This is worth knowing before anyone treats a transfer tool as a migration plan. Moving from SoundCloud to Spotify is not moving a library; it is rebuilding a smaller one.
Keeping a copy that outlives both services
Every transfer tool can export a playlist as a plain file, usually CSV, and doing that once costs nothing.
A list of artist and title survives every platform change there will ever be. Transfer services close, catalogs shift, and an account you lose access to takes its playlists with it.
This is advice people only take after losing something. A decade of curation can live entirely inside one account, and that account can be lost to a forgotten password on an email address that no longer exists.
The export takes one click and produces a file you can open in anything.
What the catalog gap means if you upload rather than listen
Everything above describes a problem for listeners and an opportunity for anyone publishing.
The reason a chart playlist transfers badly is that SoundCloud is not where commercial releases live. It is where the music that has not been through that machinery lives, which makes it the one major platform where an unsigned track sits in the same search results as everything else rather than beneath it.
The cost of that openness is volume. Vastly more is uploaded than anyone can hear, and the platform's own surfaces — search ranking, the related tracks that play after yours, the charts by genre and country — all run on early engagement.
So the opening hours of an upload decide most of its life, which is the opposite of how the licensed platforms work, where a track can be picked up by editorial months later. On SoundCloud, nothing comes back for a track that started silent.
Questions people ask about moving playlists to SoundCloud
Is there an official way to import a Spotify playlist?
No. SoundCloud has no import feature, so every method uses a third-party transfer service connecting the two accounts.
Why did only half my tracks transfer?
Because the catalogs are different. Spotify holds licensed commercial releases; SoundCloud holds mostly artist-uploaded material. Chart pop transfers badly, independent and electronic music transfers well.
Which transfer tool works best?
They produce similar results, because they query the same catalog. Soundiiz, TuneMyMusic and Songshift differ in free-tier limits rather than in match quality.
Is it safe to connect these tools to my accounts?
Use only tools that redirect you to Spotify's and SoundCloud's own sign-in screens. Anything asking for your password directly should be closed, and you can revoke access later in each platform's connected-apps settings.
Can I transfer from SoundCloud to Spotify instead?
Yes, with a worse match rate. Much of what lives on SoundCloud, including remixes, mixes and unreleased tracks, cannot be licensed to Spotify at all.
Will a transferred playlist stay complete?
Not necessarily. Tracks matched to unofficial uploads can be removed by a rights claim later, which leaves gaps that appear weeks after the transfer.
Keep reading
- plays on a SoundCloud track — Nothing on SoundCloud comes back for a track that opened silent, and plays on a SoundCloud track acts on the window where that is decided.
- what each catalog is actually made of — The match rate makes sense once you see what each catalog is actually made of, which is the real difference between the two.
- how a track gets found there — Search, charts and related tracks are the whole of discovery here, and how a track gets found there covers each.