How many songs do you have on Apple Music or Spotify? It turns out that that’s actually a much harder question to answer than you might think.
That’s because neither streaming service offers an easy “song count” feature on iOS, Android, or even PC. With that being said, there are a couple of workarounds that you can try.
How to check how many songs you have on Apple Music?
To see all of the songs on your Apple Music library, the best thing to do is add them to a single playlist on a PC or Mac.
To answer the question succinctly: there isn’t any way to see how many songs you have saved to your Library in Apple Music. At least, not on iOS.
On a computer, it is actually possible whether you have access to the Music app in Catalina or iTunes on Windows and older versions of macOS.
Just head to the Songs tab in your Music section. Once you’re there, select all of your songs and add them to a single playlist. Playlists, unlike your library itself, actually has a song count number on it.
You can, of course, do something similar on iOS or Android, but it’s a lot more tedious. You’d have to select every song on your smartphone and add them to a single playlist — which is easier said than done on mobile operating systems.
On iOS, you can actually figure out how many songs are downloaded to your device’s local storage through Apple Music or iTunes, however.
This isn’t the number of songs in your library, just the ones downloaded to your device.
Just head to Settings —> General —> About. Scroll down and you’ll see a section for Songs. These are all of the tracks saved to your iOS device’s local storage.
How to check how many songs you have on Spotify?
The “Liked songs” section doesn’t show every song in your library. But it can if you make an effort to Like every song you listen to.
Much like Apple Music, Spotify doesn’t really offer any type of way to figure out how many songs are actually in your Library. That’s true even for tracks that are downloaded locally to your device. There is a workaround for this, however.
You can select all of the songs on your various playlists and add them to a single playlist. Like with Apple Music, Spotify playlists will actually have a song count number.
Again, this is much easier to accomplish on a Mac or PC rather than a smartphone or tablet. (Also keep in mind that the mobile version of Spotify doesn’t appear to list song count under Playlists.)
It’s worth noting that the “Liked Songs” section of the Spotify app doesn’t list all of the songs you’re saved to playlists. It only lists the tracks that you’ve specifically Liked using the heart icon.
With that being said, it may be worth hitting that heart icon next to every track in your Spotify library. Once you’ve done that, you’ll be able to see a total count of all of the songs that you have.
Other music library tips
You can listen to local MP3s on both Apple Music and Spotify.
So there’s no easy way to see all of the songs that you have in your Library. But there are a few extra tips that you can keep in mind if you want to keep your streaming services tidy and organized. Here are a few important ones.
Use playlist folders. Both Apple Music and Spotify support playlist folders, which are great for organizing your library. Unfortunately, you’ll need to use the Apple Music or Spotify app on a computer to create playlist folders. On both platforms, you can create one by going to File > New > Playlist Folder.
Consider a “running tally” playlist. While it may be a pain to start, consider adding every song you like or songs across your various playlists to a single playlist called “tally” or something similar. That way, you’ll be able to see all of the songs in your Library in a single place.
Listen to your own music. If you have a non-streaming library of MP3s on your computer, you should take advantage of them by listening to them through your streaming app of choice. Apple Music makes it fairly easy to listen to local songs transferred via iTunes or the Music app. For Spotify, you can follow our previous guide on downloading local tracks.
Reader tips
Trace recommends this course of action if you are comfortable with the Unix shell
Open a terminal window and change directory to where Apple music stores albums
On Trace’s system, it is here: /Users/trace/Music/iTunes/iTunes Media/music
Then, search for and count files with extensions for songs. In Trace’s library, they are m4a for songs downloaded from the iTunes store, and .mp3 for songs digitized from vinyl or ripped from CDs. Be aware that you may have different music formats in your library
Mike is a freelance journalist from San Diego, California.
While he primarily covers Apple and consumer technology, he has past experience writing about public safety, local government, and education for a variety of publications.
He’s worn quite a few hats in the journalism field, including writer, editor, and news designer.
Or just click a song in the “Songs” Library, hit control+A/command+A, and pretend like you’re gonna drag them somewhere. A little icon with the number of songs will appear over your mouse. No need to make a playlist or even scroll to manually select all.
Or on iTunes on Windows you can go to the songs section and select all songs (select the first one, hold shift and select the last one), copy and paste into an excel spreadsheet and see how many rows you have (Google Sheets or Apple’s Numbers would probably work too).
This works better if you have a large number of songs that would likely cause iTunes to crash if you added them to a playlist all at once. (16 000 for example)
If you are comfortable with the Unix shell, you can do this on a Mac.
Open a terminal window, and change directory to where Apple music stores albums. On my system, it is here: /Users/trace/Music/iTunes/iTunes Media/music.
Then, search for and count files with extensions for songs. In my library, they are m4a for songs downloaded from the iTunes store, and .mp3 for songs digitized from vinyl or ripped from CDs. Here are two commands.
find . -name “*.mp3” | wc -l
find . -name “*.m4a” | wc -l
You may have other music formats in your library.
Or just click a song in the “Songs” Library, hit control+A/command+A, and pretend like you’re gonna drag them somewhere. A little icon with the number of songs will appear over your mouse. No need to make a playlist or even scroll to manually select all.
Or on iTunes on Windows you can go to the songs section and select all songs (select the first one, hold shift and select the last one), copy and paste into an excel spreadsheet and see how many rows you have (Google Sheets or Apple’s Numbers would probably work too).
This works better if you have a large number of songs that would likely cause iTunes to crash if you added them to a playlist all at once. (16 000 for example)
If you are comfortable with the Unix shell, you can do this on a Mac.
Open a terminal window, and change directory to where Apple music stores albums. On my system, it is here: /Users/trace/Music/iTunes/iTunes Media/music.
Then, search for and count files with extensions for songs. In my library, they are m4a for songs downloaded from the iTunes store, and .mp3 for songs digitized from vinyl or ripped from CDs. Here are two commands.
find . -name “*.mp3” | wc -l
find . -name “*.m4a” | wc -l
You may have other music formats in your library.