Google burying Play Music in October

It’s finally happening.

Google has decided to pull the plug on its first music streaming service, Google Play Music, in favour of YouTube Music.

We know that moving can be hard. That’s why you can now transfer your @GooglePlayMusic library to #YouTubeMusic in just 3 simple steps → https://t.co/MleJKON2S5 pic.twitter.com/DqKEDhReS0

— YouTube Music (@youtubemusic) August 4, 2020

The search giant has been teasing the end of Play Music since Youtube Music entered the scene in June 2018. 

It’s been a slow fall from grace for Play Music. At first, Google stopped allowing independent artists to upload music, then it created a transfer tool that took months to roll out and now, it’s officially announced the end of the music streaming service.

Of course, it’s not actually shutting down today. Instead, Canadian users have until October to keep using the platform, but after that, you won’t be able to listen to music or podcasts on the service. However, Google is going to allow people to use the new YouTube Music transfer tool until some time in December.

If you don’t want to transfer to YouTube Music, you can use a service like Songshift to transfer your playlists to another platform like Spotify. If you have a lot of music that you purchase, you can use Google Takeout to download those MP3 files to your computer. Takeout also downloads a CSV file with a list of all your albums and playlists, so at least you can have a written record of what you used to listen to.

It’s worth mentioning that if you plan to use a third-party transfer tool to move to Spotify or Tidal, you should do it before October in case Google blocks the ability to use these tools once consumers can’t use the app anymore.

That said, the official YouTube Music transfer tool and Google Takeout will continue to work until some point in December.Via: Android Police