Can you burn Apple Music, YouTube or Amazon Music to a CD?

Which services can you burn to CD?

The rule is simple. If you bought the song as a download, you can burn it. If you’re renting it through a subscription, or it’s a stream, you can’t.

Why streaming songs won't burn

A streaming subscription pays for access to a catalogue, for as long as you keep paying. The downloads in your app are there so you can listen without signal, and the service protects them (DRM) so they play only inside its app. A CD burner sees them as locked files, or doesn’t see them at all.

A purchase is a copy you keep. Apple’s own help pages make the contrast clear: content you buy and download can’t be revoked, and you can download past purchases again on your authorized computers and devices, up to 10 in total. That ownership is what makes a song burnable.

Songs you imported from your own CDs are yours in the same way. If the old albums are still in a box somewhere, ripping them into the Music app or Windows Media Player is a free way to fill part of a playlist before you buy the rest.

Can you burn a CD from Apple Music?

Not from the subscription. Apple’s Music User Guide says it plainly: “Music you download from Apple Music to your computer can’t be burned to a disc.” Those downloads are for listening inside Apple’s apps while you subscribe.

iTunes Store purchases are different. A song you bought is yours to burn. Make a playlist of purchased songs in the Music app, insert a blank CD-R, choose File > Burn Playlist to Disc and pick Audio CD. Our guide to burning a CD on a Mac walks through every setting.

• Mixed playlists won’t burn. Apple notes that if a playlist contains items with usage restrictions, the Burn Playlist to Disc option may not appear. One Apple Music download in a playlist of purchases is enough. Build a fresh playlist with only songs you bought or ripped.
• There’s a burn limit on some purchases. Apple’s Media Services terms let you burn a playlist of purchased music up to seven times, and say the limit doesn’t apply to DRM-free content.
• Your library may be a mix. A song in your library can come from the subscription even if it looks like the rest. If burning fails, buying the track from the iTunes Store is the clean fix.

YouTube and YouTube Music

How to burn a CD from YouTube: you can’t, legitimately. YouTube videos are streams, not files, and YouTube’s terms don’t allow downloading them outside the features YouTube itself provides. YouTube Music works the same way: Premium lets you save songs for offline listening, but they play only inside the YouTube Music app.

You’ll find plenty of “YouTube to MP3” sites promising otherwise. We don’t recommend them. They break YouTube’s terms, many are full of pop-ups and dodgy downloads, and the sound is a compressed stream compressed a second time.

Amazon Music

Amazon runs two different things under the Amazon Music name, and only one of them burns.

• Amazon Music Unlimited and the music included with Prime are subscriptions. Their downloads are for offline listening in the Amazon Music app and can’t be burned to a CD.
• Amazon’s digital music store sells songs and albums to keep. Those purchases download as audio files you can add to the Music app on a Mac or Windows Media Player Legacy on a PC and burn as an audio CD. See how to burn a CD on Windows for the PC steps.

Getting any playlist onto a CD

Whatever service your playlist lives on, the route to a CD is the same.

1. Build the song list. Write down every title and artist, in order. Our playlist length calculator turns a pasted list into a clean numbered tracklist and tells you how many 80-minute CDs it needs. Our playlist converter can also move a playlist you built here, or a CSV export, to another service.
2. Buy the tracks you don’t own from the iTunes Store, Amazon’s digital music store, Bandcamp or Qobuz. Check each one is the version you want: studio or live, clean or explicit.
3. Burn them as an audio CD on a CD-R. Our main guide to how to burn a CD covers the drive, burn speed and labelling.

Or skip steps two and three. We take public playlist links from Apple Music, YouTube Music, Amazon Music and Spotify, or a typed song list, and burn them to real audio CDs that play in any car or stereo.

Playlist stuck in a streaming app? Send us the link and we’ll burn it to a custom CD mixtape, test-played and posted in 1 to 3 business days.

Read how our custom CD mixtapes work for packages and covers. Have a Spotify playlist? Our guide to burning a Spotify playlist to CD goes deeper on getting the list out of Spotify.