Making song links for any streaming service

We live under capitalism, so of course there are eleventy billion ways to play a song, many of which are hoping to get you to commit to subscription fees. All hail the subscription economy!

I'm the Apple Music type of consumer, owing in part to my stack of Apple stuff but also because I can upload music to it that isn't in the catalog. (Streaming rights being what they are, this has turned out to be a critical need. That and yt-dlp have kept me listening to stuff I wouldn't be able to otherwise.)

But I'm also a social creature, and I want to share music with people, some of whom inexplicably subscribe to Spotify! How do I do that?

Of course, there's no problem you can't fix on the Internet by layering another website on top of it, right? The service I was using for a good while that takes care of this is Songwhip. Open, paste my Apple Music link (or type what I'm listening to), and get a link that'll take people to their favorite service, if the gods of music cataloging and exclusivity contracts are smiling on me today.

This ended up unwieldy, though. Share to clipboard, open songwhip dot com, paste, search, copy, open wherever I'm sharing to, paste. Surely I could, fresh off my success with Imgur, make this smoother using iOS Shortcuts and the share sheet? Bonus if it also worked on macOS.

Songwhip FAQ, after talking at length about their support on Android:

On iOS many Songwhip power users use 'Shortcuts' to create Songwhip pages directly from their music apps.

I bet they do.

It was just last week I finally deleted the nonfunctional Songwhip Shortcut I'd tried to make. There are probably working ones on Reddit, but I didn't particularly feel like trying a bunch.

Today, though, I decided to ask the fediverse what they used. I got a recommendation for Songlink, and they've already got not just one, but a whole bunch of Shortcuts. I grabbed Share Short Songlink URL.

Now, my workflow is share, pick the Shortcut, and pick a destination that I want to share to. Boom.

I did fix one thing—the clipboard copy was broken (just referred to a nonexistent variable), which made it difficult to share the link to an unsupported app—like pasting into this post! So, here's my fixed version.

In celebration, here's some music for you!

• Dessa - 5 out of 6. My "I'm rising above this shit" anthem.
• Kathleen - Fever Dream. My "I'm drowning in this shit" anthem.
• Loom - Uèle Lamore. A suite of creation. Discovered on the Apple Music Classical Edge video playlist, which really could use an update.

Enjoy. 🎵