How to Export a Spotify Playlist to CSV

Why anyone bothers exporting a playlist to a spreadsheet

Playlists disappear more often than people expect. A song gets pulled when a licensing deal lapses and quietly vanishes from your list. A collaborative playlist gets wiped by someone with edit access. An account gets locked, or you decide to leave Spotify and want to take your library with you. In every one of those cases, a plain CSV of the tracklist is the cheapest insurance you can buy, because it is a few kilobytes of text that no takedown or account change can touch.

There are other reasons too. You might want to hand a DJ or a wedding band a clean list of songs. You might want to sort your "liked" library by release year or count how many tracks are by the same artist, which is trivial in a spreadsheet and impossible inside the Spotify app. Or you might be planning to rebuild the playlist somewhere else and want the raw data first.

One thing to be clear about from the start: a CSV is a list, not the audio. It records that track X by artist Y exists on the playlist. It does not contain a single second of sound. If your real goal is to keep the music itself, exporting to CSV is step one, and converting the tracks to actual files is step two. We will cover both, because most people who search for this end up wanting both.

The tools that actually work, and what each costs

Spotify has no built-in export button. There is no "download as CSV" anywhere in the app or the web player, which is exactly why a small ecosystem of third-party tools exists. Three are worth your time.

Exportify is the one most people should start with. It is a free, open source tool (MIT licensed) that runs entirely in your browser and talks to the official Spotify Web API. Because it runs client side, the project states plainly that no data is saved on a server. You log in with Spotify, grant read-only access to your playlists, and it spits out a CSV. It is the tool the developer community reaches for, and the source is on GitHub if you want to read exactly what it does before you authorize it. The rough consensus in the Spotify user community and similar threads is that Exportify is the trusted default precisely because it is open source and read-only.

TuneMyMusic is the friendlier, no-login-required-to-understand option. It exports playlists, liked songs, albums, and followed artists to CSV or TXT. Its free tier lets you transfer or export up to 500 tracks, per their own FAQ, after which you need a paid plan. Good for a single moderate playlist, less good for a 3,000-song library.

Soundiiz supports a huge range of services and produces clean CSV/Excel files, but the export-to-file feature sits behind its Premium tier. If you are already paying Soundiiz to move playlists between services, the export is right there. If you just want one CSV, it is overkill.

Tool	Cost for CSV export	Login	Best for
Exportify	Free, open source	Spotify OAuth (read-only)	Most people; one playlist or all of them at once
TuneMyMusic	Free up to 500 tracks, then paid	Spotify login	A single moderate playlist, TXT or CSV
Soundiiz	Export is a Premium feature	Spotify login	People already using it to move libraries between services

Exporting with Exportify, step by step

This is the free route, and it takes about two minutes.

1. Go to the Exportify site (exportify.app) and click Get Started.
2. Log in with your Spotify account and approve the read-only access request. Exportify asks only to read your playlists. It cannot change or delete anything.
3. You will see a list of your playlists. Click Export next to any single playlist to download that one as a CSV. To grab everything at once, click Export All, which packages every playlist into a zip of CSV files.
4. Open the downloaded .csv in Excel, Google Sheets, Numbers, or any text editor. Done.

If a playlist belongs to someone else but you follow it, you can usually still export it as long as it is public and shows up in your account. Your own playlists and liked songs are the reliable case.

What is actually in the CSV

This is the part most guides skip, and it matters, because the columns are what make the file useful. Exportify writes a genuinely detailed row for every track. The main columns you get are:

• Track URI and Track Name
• Artist URI(s) and Artist Name(s)
• Album URI, Album Name, and Album Artist Name(s)
• Album Release Date and Album Image URL
• Disc Number and Track Number
• Track Duration (ms), the length in milliseconds
• Track Preview URL and Explicit?
• Popularity, Spotify's 0 to 100 score
• ISRC, the international recording code that uniquely identifies the exact recording
• Added By and Added At, who added the track and when

The URIs and the ISRC are the quiet heroes here. If you ever need to rebuild the playlist or match tracks on another service, those identifiers point at the exact recording, so you avoid grabbing a live version or a remaster by mistake. The Track Duration (ms) column is worth converting to minutes with a quick formula (divide by 60000) if you are eyeballing lengths.

A caveat worth stating: Exportify once offered extra columns for Spotify's "audio features" (danceability, energy, tempo, and so on). Spotify deprecated that part of its Web API for new apps in late 2024, and developers have been reporting 403 errors on those endpoints ever since, so those analytical columns may be empty or unavailable now. The core track, artist, album, and ISRC data is unaffected. Do not build a plan around the audio-features fields.

Saving as Excel or a plain text list instead

A CSV opens directly in Excel and Google Sheets, so "export to Excel" and "export to CSV" are effectively the same job. Open the CSV, then use File, Save As and pick .xlsx if you want a native Excel workbook with formatting and formulas saved in.

If you want something even simpler, a plain text list of "Artist - Track" lines, TunemyMusic's TXT export or a two-column copy-paste out of your spreadsheet does it. That format is handy for pasting into an email, a forum post, or a note, and for feeding into other tools that accept a plain tracklist.

The honest limitation, and the follow-on step

Here is the thing the export tools will not tell you: a spreadsheet full of song titles is a catalog, not a collection. The day a track leaves Spotify, your CSV still lists it, but you cannot play it. The list survives; the music does not.

If the whole reason you are exporting is fear of losing the actual songs, do the export first as your record, then back up the audio as real files. The two steps complement each other. The CSV is your manifest, the tiny permanent proof of what the playlist contained. The audio files are the payload.

That second step is what our tools handle. Paste the same playlist share link into our playlist converter and it works through the tracklist, matching and converting each song to MP3, FLAC, WAV, or AAC, then hands you a zip. Our Spotify playlist downloader page walks through the batch process, the quirks of very large playlists, and how to handle tracks that fail to match. For the format and quality side (why 320 kbps MP3 is the realistic ceiling and when FLAC is worth it), the convert a Spotify playlist to MP3 guide goes deeper.

The archivist's order is worth copying: export the tracklist first, convert the audio second, then verify the folder against the CSV so you know exactly which songs landed and which few need a manual pass. If a run skips six tracks out of two hundred, the CSV is how you spot them.

If you are exporting to switch services, not to back up

Sometimes the CSV is a stepping stone to a different platform rather than a backup. If your endgame is moving a playlist to Apple Music, YouTube Music, or Tidal, you can often skip the spreadsheet entirely and use a direct transfer tool that reads the Spotify playlist and recreates it on the other service. We cover that path in the guide on transferring a Spotify playlist to Apple Music. Export to CSV when you want a durable record or plan to analyze the data; use a direct transfer when you just want the same playlist living on another app.

A note on legality and your login

Exporting a tracklist is about as low-risk as it gets. You are copying metadata (titles, artist names, dates) that is factual information, not the copyrighted recordings themselves, so a CSV of a playlist sits in very different territory from ripping the audio. Sharing a list of song names is normal and fine.

The one thing to be careful about is what you authorize. Exportify, TuneMyMusic, and Soundiiz all use Spotify's official OAuth login, which means you approve access on Spotify's own page and never hand your password to the third party. Read the permission scope: a read-only export tool should ask to read your playlists, not to modify them. Never type your Spotify password directly into a random site's form, and be wary of any "exporter" that wants more access than reading playlists requires. When you convert the audio later, the same rule holds. A converter that needs your account login to download a public playlist is asking for more than it should. For the full picture of every method (single songs, albums, whole libraries, and format tradeoffs), the Spotify hub collects it in one place.

Sources

• Exportify project page. Confirmed it is free, MIT-licensed, open source, runs entirely in the browser against the Spotify Web API with read-only OAuth, and the exact CSV columns it produces (Track URI, Track Name, Artist Name(s), Album Name, Album Release Date, Track Number, Track Duration (ms), Popularity, ISRC, Added By, Added At, etc.).
• TuneMyMusic Spotify-to-file page. Confirmed it exports playlists, liked songs, albums, and artists to CSV or TXT via a three-step connect/select/export flow.
• TuneMyMusic FAQ. Confirmed the free plan caps transfers and exports at 500 tracks before a paid plan is required.
• Soundiiz tutorial. Confirmed the Export-as-File to CSV (EXCEL) steps and that the export-to-file feature is a Premium feature.
• Spotify Developer Community thread. Developers reporting 403 errors on the deprecated Audio Features endpoint, used to note that Exportify's optional audio-features columns may no longer populate.

Frequently Asked Questions

How do I export a Spotify playlist to CSV for free?

Use Exportify. It is a free, open source tool that runs in your browser, logs in through Spotify's official read-only access, and exports any playlist to a CSV in about two minutes. TuneMyMusic is a free alternative for up to 500 tracks.

Does Spotify have a built-in export button?

No. There is no export-to-CSV or download-as-file option anywhere in the Spotify app or web player. That gap is exactly why third-party tools like Exportify exist.

What columns are in the exported CSV?

Exportify includes track name, artist, album, album release date, track number, duration in milliseconds, popularity, the ISRC recording code, who added the track, and when, among others. The URIs and ISRC uniquely identify each exact recording.

Can I export a Spotify playlist to Excel?

Yes. A CSV opens directly in Excel and Google Sheets. Open the exported file and use Save As to keep it as an .xlsx workbook if you want native Excel formatting and formulas.

Is exporting a playlist to CSV legal?

Exporting the tracklist is copying factual metadata (titles, artists, dates), not the copyrighted audio, so it is very low risk and normal to share. Downloading the actual songs is a separate matter governed by personal-use rules.

Does the CSV contain the actual music?

No. A CSV is a list of song details only, with no audio. To keep the music itself, convert the playlist to MP3 or FLAC files after you export the list.

How do I back up the songs, not just the list?

Export the CSV first as your record, then paste the same playlist link into a converter like our playlist tool to download each track as an MP3, FLAC, WAV, or AAC file. Verify the folder against the CSV afterward to catch any that were skipped.