Google Play Music

Google Play Music stopped working at the start of December, but the files you uploaded to the cloud locker and other data remain available for export. That will be changing later in February when Google deletes all information associated with Play Music.

Google started shutting down its legacy streaming service around the world in October. Google Play Music is now officially dead for all users.

At the start of August, Google provided an official timeline for shutting down YouTube Music’s predecessor. Google Play Music has now stopped working for many users on Android, iOS, and the web.

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.

Google Play Music will soon be shut down, pushing its users to either YouTube Music or to switch to another provider entirely. Parts of Play Music have been closing for a few weeks, and now, Google Assistant speakers are losing support.

At the start of August, Google provided an official deprecation timeline for Play Music. The incremental shutdown continues today with Google getting rid of the ability to buy music from the Play Store worldwide.

By October, YouTube Music’s predecessor will stop working around the world. Ahead of that, the latest version of Google Play Music for Android introduces an “Export local playlists” capability.

At the start of this month, Google laid out how Play Music will stop working starting in October. The move is controversial to some, and the company today sent out a survey to YouTube Music users that have transitioned their library. 

Google is preparing to shift all Google Play Music users over to YouTube Music in just a matter of weeks, but there are still a lot of loose ends to tie up to get to feature parity. Today, Google has confirmed that the Play Music app for Wear OS will die in just a couple of weeks, but YouTube Music isn’t coming any time soon.

In May, the push to get Play Music users to switch to YouTube Music started in earnest with the launch of a long-awaited transfer tool. Google today explained the shutdown timeline for Play Music and fully detailed what’s going away.

One month ago today, Google announced that it would start transitioning Play Music users to YouTube Music. The company explicitly said that the migration tool would become available “over the next couple of weeks.” A warning in YouTube Music today notes that “transfers are delayed” due to “high demand.”

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Ahead of Play Music shutting down later this year, Google last week started letting users transition their libraries to YouTube Music. The full rollout of the YouTube Music transfer tool will take several weeks, but you can now sign-up for early access.

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Play Music has been in limbo since YouTube Music relaunched two years ago. As the latter streaming service gains new features — like last week’s Now Playing redesign and discovery revamp, the Play-branded app has been functionally and visually frozen. Users have had no choice but to keep using it as switching would require starting their audio experience from scratch. That’s changing today as Google starts letting you transition Play Music libraries to YouTube Music.

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YouTube Music has seen a number of changes in recent weeks ahead of Play Music’s eventual deprecation. The latest tweaks how the YouTube Music Library is organized by separating “Subscriptions.”

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According to two sources familiar with the matter, Google has internally rolled out a beta version of YouTube Music that adds support for the music library/cloud locker functionality you might be familiar with from Google Play Music. One source suggested that efforts to transition Google Play Music users to YouTube Music are right around the corner…

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Behind-the-scenes, Google requires hardware manufacturers to preinstall certain apps to get access to other first-party services. YouTube Music is now on that list for newly launched Android 10 devices, while the soon-to-be-replaced Play Music is being dropped.

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