Google Play Music Will be Shut Down by End of the Year

Google Play Music is a monthly music subscription service provided by Google. It was launched in the United States in November 2011 and introduced to Japan in September 2015.

Japan users can save up to 50,000 songs in the cloud server for free, or they can pay 980 yen per month to listen to more than 35 million songs. However, Google announced that it would launch YouTube Music in 2018 as a breakthrough follow-up service, and plans to integrate all music services under this project in the future.

Since the announcement of integration plan, Google Play Music has been operating for nearly two years. Until May 2020. YouTube’s official blog announced that by end of this year, all services on Google Play Music will be migrated to YouTube Music.

Google’s YouTube team updated its official blog on August 4, stating: “Today, we have two important announcements. The first is that Google Play Music will be merged into YouTube Music by December 2020. By then, users will be able to transfer your personal music library on Google Play Music to YouTube Music. Secondly, in the next few months, Google Play Music services will be shutting down gradually till the server is finally emptied."

According to the announcement, by the end of August, Google Play Music will no longer support services for music purchase or uploading through its upload manager.

Starting in October in New Zealand, South Africa and other regions, streaming services in the Google Play Music application will no longer be available. However, playlists, upload/purchase history, and information on "favourite" tag will all be retained till December, so Google urges users to quickly transfer to YouTube Music.

There are basically two ways for users to prevent Google Play Music data loss. One is to use a transfer tool; using this method, you not only transfer music files, but also playlists.

In addition, users who do not want to switch to YouTube Music can use Google Data Export to export data and download backups by themselves.

The YouTube Music team said: "In the past few years, we have been trying to merge the best of both worlds, Google Play Music and YouTube to create the best YouTube music experience."