How to Move Your Music Library to Android

Before you plug anything in, sort your collection into two piles. The first is local files: MP3s, FLAC, M4A, or WAV sitting on an old phone, an SD card, or your computer. These are yours to copy freely. The second is streaming content: playlists and saved albums inside Spotify, YouTube Music, Apple Music, Tidal, and so on. You do not own those audio files, so you move the list of songs rather than the songs themselves.

Most people have both. A music collection from the 2000s tends to be loose files, while anything added in the last few years is usually streaming. Knowing the split tells you which sections below apply to you. If you mostly stream, you can skip ahead to the playlist part. If you have a folder of files you have been carrying since forever, start with the USB method.

This is the most reliable way to move files, and it is free. Connect your Android phone to a Windows PC or a Mac with a USB-C cable. On the phone, a notification appears about the USB connection. Tap it and choose File Transfer (on some phones this is labeled MTP). The phone now shows up as a drive.

On Windows, open File Explorer, click the phone under This PC, open Internal storage, and find or create a Music folder. Drag your files in. On a Mac you need the Android File Transfer utility from Google, since macOS will not see the phone otherwise. Once the copy finishes, eject the phone properly before unplugging it so you do not corrupt anything mid-write.

Stick to standard formats like MP3, FLAC, or M4A. Once the files land, a music app needs to scan them to build a library. A good local player makes that painless, and we walk through the strong options in our roundup of the best music player apps for Android. Most will index the Music folder automatically on first launch.

If both phones are Android and you are setting up the new one, Google's built-in setup wizard copies a lot during the first boot, but it often skips music and other media. Do not assume your tracks came across just because contacts and apps did. Check the Music folder before you wipe the old phone.

For a direct phone-to-phone move, an app like Files by Google has a Nearby Share style transfer that sends files over a local connection without using mobile data. Open Files on both phones, pick the audio files on the old one, and send them across. It is slower than USB for a large collection, but it needs no cable and no PC. A USB-C flash drive or an SD card reader works too if you would rather move files in bulk by hand.

If you are leaving one streaming service for another, you are moving playlists, not audio. A transfer tool reads your playlists on the old service and recreates them on the new one by matching song titles. The two most common are TuneMyMusic and Soundiiz, both of which work in a phone browser or, in some cases, an app.

As of late 2025, Spotify built TuneMyMusic directly into its mobile app. On Android, open Spotify, go to Your Library, scroll to the bottom, and tap Import your music. You connect the service you are leaving, pick the playlists, and Spotify rebuilds them. TuneMyMusic's free tier covers a limited number of tracks per transfer (around 500 at the time of writing), and you pay if your library is larger. Soundiiz and FreeYourMusic offer similar free-then-paid models. Note that SongShift, which older guides mention, is iOS-only, so on Android reach for one of the web-based tools instead.

These tools are handy if you also grab tracks for offline use. If that is your goal, our guide to the best music downloader apps for Android covers what is allowed and what is not.

If your music lives in Apple Music, the move is genuinely simple. Apple Music has a full Android app on Google Play. Install it, sign in with the same Apple ID, and your entire library, including playlists and saved albums, syncs down automatically because it already lives in the cloud. Nothing to transfer by hand. We cover the day-to-day experience in our look at Apple Music on Android.

If instead you have loose music files on an iPhone, those are trickier. The cleanest path is to copy them from your iTunes or Apple Music library on a computer first, then move that folder to Android over USB as described above. Google's official iPhone-to-Android switch tool moves photos, contacts, and messages but leaves music for you to handle manually, so do not count on it for your tracks.

Two things trip people up. First, purchased and DRM-protected tracks may refuse to move. Older purchases from some stores, and anything still wrapped in copy protection, will not simply copy as a playable file. If a song will not play on the new phone, DRM is the usual reason, and there is no clean fix beyond re-buying or streaming it.

Second, playlist transfers are matches, not perfect copies. The tool searches the new service for each song by title and artist. If a track is not in the new service's catalog, a live version, a regional release, or an obscure remix, it gets silently skipped. After any transfer, compare the song counts. A playlist of 200 that arrives with 188 lost a dozen songs to mismatches. The tools usually show you which ones failed, so check that list before you cancel the old subscription.

For most people the order goes like this. Move local files first over USB while you still have the old phone in hand. Install your streaming apps and sign in, since cloud libraries reappear on their own. Run a playlist transfer only for services you are actually changing, and verify the song counts afterward. Keep the old phone or a backup folder untouched until you have confirmed everything arrived.

Once the library is settled, the rest is about playback. If you want tighter control over how it all sounds and is organized on the new phone, the broader music and audio section walks through players, equalizers, and the tools that make a fresh library feel like home.