YouTube Music still doesn’t work for kids with Google Play Music set to shut down any day now

Ben Schoon | Oct 18 2020 - 11:47 am PT

With streaming music being the norm now, just about every major service offers a family plan so everyone can enjoy it at a discounted rate. With YouTube Music, though, family plans get complicated for younger kids, and there’s no fix in sight either.

For quite some time now, parents have been able to sign up for Google’s various family plan offerings for everything from ad-free YouTube to sharing movie and app libraries. It’s a handy way to save some cash while still allowing each family member to have their own account.

With Google Play Music, families were able to get their own libraries on a single subscription, kids included! Play Music is set to shut down this month, though, meaning the service could quite literally stop working at any moment. It’s already dead on Google Assistant speakers. That’s a real shame for families because YouTube Music just isn’t up to par.

Google has been working to bring more features to YouTube Music over the past several months as we’ve covered heavily, but with days to go, family plans still aren’t fixed for kids. Currently, any child under the age of 13 cannot use YouTube Music in any capacity, meaning when you switch from one service to the other, they’ll lose all of their music and playlists instantly with no way to get it back until they turn 13. This restriction is described on a Google support page (emphasis our own) and was highlighted back in June by our friends at Android Police.

When you use Family Link to create a Google Account for your child under 13, your child can use the YouTube Kids app where it’s available. However, they can’t use any other YouTube apps, websites, or features until they turn 13 and manage their own Google Account. Your child will be able to use YouTube if you added supervision to their previously existing Google Account.

This is a problem for many parents right now, as it’s crunch time to move from Play Music over to YouTube Music. One user on Twitter posted how his daughter can’t listen to music anymore and there’s nothing he can do about it. Further, the founder of Linus Tech Tips also briefly spoke out in an episode of TechLinked clearly frustrated over the restriction.

My 7yo daughter is begging me to fix Google.

Since @google has now replaced @GooglePlayMusic with @youtubemusic, our family subscription no longer allows my kids' accounts to access music on their @googlenest devices.

I'm not finding any workarounds yet.
— Accidental CISO (@AccidentalCISO) October 18, 2020

So, what’s the solution? Either Google needs to get things working as they should in the next two weeks, or a lot of families are going to need to switch to another music streaming platform. Somewhat luckily, just about every other major platform supports this. Spotify charges $14.99 a month for six accounts with no age limits and even offers a kid-specific app. Apple Music has the same pricing. Amazon Music also offers the same price, but like Apple’s option, it won’t work on Google Assistant speakers. What you shouldn’t do is create a fake Google account for your child. That can lead to problems down the line if Google finds out the account is being used by someone underage.