Photo Credit: YouTube
The long-awaited death of Google Play Music may happen in 2020. A new YouTube Music beta brings many features GPM users have wanted for years.
Back in 2018, Google confirmed it was looking to migrate GPM subscribers to the newly launched YouTube Music. Now two years later, an internal beta of YouTube Music adds some long-missing features.
The new beta version of YouTube Music now includes support for user-uploaded music. Google Play Music allowed users to maintain a library of up to 10,000 uploaded songs. Many long-time GPM users refuse to give up this feature. Making it available on YouTube Music should help with the migration process of user subscriptions.
Google was expected to begin transitioning Google Play Music subscribers to YouTube Music in 2019.
The exodus didn’t happen officially, but we did see a few changes to make the move easier. First, YouTube Music is now the default music player on all Android devices. Google maintains a list of apps that are required to be included on Android. It removed GPM from that list and replaced it with YouTube music.
Now it’s looking like 2020 may be the year that Google Play Music subscribers have to make a choice. So far, there’s no indication that Google will provide an easy way to export playlists and radio stations. Back in 2018, when YouTube Music launched, Google promised a way to may the migration easy on current users.
GPM has been in limbo so long that many people (like myself) have already jumped ship. I subscribed to Spotify over the summer and haven’t looked back – ad-free YouTube doesn’t appeal to me. For now, YouTube Music is growing at a healthy rate and appears to have at least 20 million paying subscribers.
To all you die-hard Google Play Music fans – you might want to start looking at other options if YouTube Music isn’t your thing.