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Google Music

Google Play Music Shutdown Dates Set: Service To Be Replaced by YouTube Music by End of 2020 (variety.com) 76

Posted by msmash from the shape-of-things-to-come dept.
The last dance is looming for Google Play Music, the subscription service that will be fully subsumed into YouTube Music by December 2020, the internet company announced. From a report: In streamlining its music offerings, Google is coming down the home stretch of a months-long migration of users from Google Play Music -- which will start shutting down in September -- to the YouTube Music app. In May, the company launched a migration tool (available at music.youtube.com/transfer) that lets Google Play Music customers transfer their music libraries to YouTube Music. Starting in September 2020 in New Zealand and South Africa -- and in October for all other global markets -- users will no longer be able to stream from or use the Google Play Music app. However, according to Google, it will retain users' playlists, uploads, purchases, likes and other data until December 2020 to give them time to transfer to YouTube Music. After the end of the year, Google Play Music libraries will no longer be available.
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Google Play Music Shutdown Dates Set: Service To Be Replaced by YouTube Music by End of 2020 More

Google Play Music Shutdown Dates Set: Service To Be Replaced by YouTube Music by End of 2020

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  • Comment removed (Score:5, Funny)

    by account_deleted ( 4530225 ) on Tuesday August 04, 2020 @11:47AM (#60365387)
    Comment removed based on user account deletion

  • | The YouTube channel you're currently using isn't supported for the Google Play Music transfer. Switch to another YouTube channel associated with this account to continue transferring

    I've had this account for more than a decade. Never joined my youtube to my google+ auto-created profile. Why can't my account transfer music over? Guess I'll just have to get the desktop Google Music downloader and upload to Youtube music if that's a thing. If not, I guess I'll just use my phone storage for all of my purchase

    • Re:Switch YouTube accounts to continue transfer (Score:4, Insightful)

      by Luckyo ( 1726890 ) on Tuesday August 04, 2020 @11:55AM (#60365423)

      >If not, I guess I'll just use my phone storage for all of my purchased music and deny google the chance to get some analytics...

      Oh you innocent summer child...

    • That's a lot of trouble to go through for a company that is making your life difficult. Why are you doing all of this? Why not just own your music and be done with this whole upload/download/account mess?

      • Generally, the things I've purchased on google music are because the alternatives were objectively worse. :S

    • I concur with other responses to this message. Why go through all this trouble when this company makes your life difficult? For instance, I moved to Plexamp [plexamp.com], and I couldn't be happier: Like Google Play Music, I can play my songs on my car radio through my car's Bluetooth; my music immediately updates on changes I make to the music files on my Plex server; Plexamp is much more reliable than Google Play Music's app, and service ever was.
      • Plexamp requires plexpass.......

        I wouldnt get too comfortable with Plex, they are one step away from implementing ads, even with plexpass.
    • I had the same problem. I kept my old YouTube account separate from my Google+, but what that really meant is that Good considers my Google account to have two YouTube accounts, one with my old username and one with my Google email. When I transferred my music from Google Play Music, it transferred it into the Google email YouTube account that I don't use, not the YouTube username account that I do use.

    • When a discontinued service account is preventing you from moving data where you want from a service about to be discontinued.

  • Suggestions for alternatives? (Score:3)

    by Synonymous Cowered ( 6159202 ) on Tuesday August 04, 2020 @11:56AM (#60365433)

    So, what alternatives would other suggest to fill the void? I don't want to pay a monthly fee. I like to buy mostly CDs, but also a handful of MP3s from amazon. What are my options to stream this data? Granted I can just manually copy my most commonly played stuff to my phone and use an android app to play those, but for the rest of my library for that occasional use? I'm guessing I open my firewall (or better, VPN to home) and host something at home that I can access. I could try to host it on my web hosting space, though the trick is keeping it private enough so nobody stumbles on it and I accidentally distribute copyrighted material.

    • Plex with the Plexamp app [plexamp.com] to listen to your music.

      • Re:Suggestions for alternatives? (Score:5, Insightful)

        by sremick ( 91371 ) on Tuesday August 04, 2020 @12:45PM (#60365621)

        I second this. Google Play Music was kind of nice. Youtube Music is a fucking dumpster fire.

        I had been a Plex user for many years and knew about the music feature but had dismissed it since the metadata matching engine wouldn't run under FreeNAS. I revisited it and turns out that's been fixed, so a few months ago I started a big project to rip all my music into Plex. With that and the PlexAmp app, not only do I have a superior experience to either Youtube Music OR Google Play Music, but I can share with whomever the fuck I wish, even my dad who'll never make a Google account..

        I love Plex.

        • Youtube Music has almost the entire AoA discography, with the official music videos for songs with those.

          There isn't really much else a person should need.

          • I would appreciate it if it worked with my car's controls.

            With Google Play Music, I can scroll through my "radio station" and click on a song I'd like by title from my steering wheel.

            With YouTube Music I cannot. I can't even skip from my steering wheel (though that part I'm willing to blame the car on).

            I find the YouTube Music interface annoying in general, but the lower comparability with Bluetooth controls is the far bigger annoyance.

            • It would be really, really, exceptionally easy to make a utility for this.

              Of course, since I'm assuming you have a proprietary car entertainment system with no user programs allowed, you'd need some sort of hardware interface board. You could use a Raspberry Pi or something.

              Personally, I can't imagine wanting either in my car.

    • So, what alternatives would other suggest to fill the void? I don't want to pay a monthly fee. I like to buy mostly CDs, but also a handful of MP3s from amazon. What are my options to stream this data? Granted I can just manually copy my most commonly played stuff to my phone and use an android app to play those, but for the rest of my library for that occasional use? I'm guessing I open my firewall (or better, VPN to home) and host something at home that I can access. I could try to host it on my web hosting space, though the trick is keeping it private enough so nobody stumbles on it and I accidentally distribute copyrighted material.

      dropbox, google drive, onedrive....

      • That's an interesting idea. I see the are apps that can play from there. I had not considered that. Unfortunately I've got more than 15GB of music (and my free google drive is already 2/3 full anyway). So I'd just be shifting the monthly cost elsewhere. But drive is only $2/m for 100GB, so it's certainly more palatable.

        One thing I liked about google music is that they have the automatic uploader. I just rip my CD to my home network storage, and the app monitors that folder and automatically uploads whatever

        • That's an interesting idea. I see the are apps that can play from there. I had not considered that. Unfortunately I've got more than 15GB of music (and my free google drive is already 2/3 full anyway). So I'd just be shifting the monthly cost elsewhere. But drive is only $2/m for 100GB, so it's certainly more palatable.

          One thing I liked about google music is that they have the automatic uploader. I just rip my CD to my home network storage, and the app monitors that folder and automatically uploads whatever it finds. I only have to worry about making my local copy and deals with the rest. And it works well for when my wife buys a CD and rips it to the network. We each have our own google accounts, and we each have the uploader running on our own desktops. So when she gets that CD and rips it, it shows up in both of our google music accounts. Do you know of solutions like this for google drive?

          Dropbox usually has a local directory on your system which you could directly rip to, and automatically update.

          I have some text files, DVD's owned, Movies Wanted, Books wanted that I have on my dropbox account. I linked them (on Linux) to files in my home directory (so I can find them easily) and I can just edit them and the dropbox files are automatically updated.

          One other advantage of using some external site (as opposed to self-hosting) is that you won't impact bandwidth caps on both you phone an

    • Do you have enough music to fill a 120 gig microsd?

      • No, but I use a google pixel 3xl (and she uses an iphone 8, I think), so neither of us have an SD slot. Also, that unfortunately also has the downside of having to manually recopy over new music every time we buy something. I was looking for the least maintenance option

    • I had subscribed to a Subsonic server for a while (between when Ubuntu Music shutdown and I switched to Spotify and then Google Play Music).

      I was quite happy with it, of it still exists, you could self host it. It was a pretty slick F/OSS streaming of owned files service with a nice mobile app.
    • Comment removed based on user account deletion
    • I have a simple FTP server at home. I don't know how anybody would ever stumble across it. If they did, they'd still have to hack the password.

      For my mobile mp3 player and my car, I just copy a whole bunch of stuff onto those devices.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by ljw1004 ( 764174 )

      So, what alternatives would other suggest to fill the void? I don't want to pay a monthly fee. I like to buy mostly CDs, but also a handful of MP3s from amazon. What are my options to stream this data? Granted I can just manually copy my most commonly played stuff to my phone and use an android app to play those, but for the rest of my library for that occasional use? I'm guessing I open my firewall (or better, VPN to home) and host something at home that I can access. I could try to host it on my web hosting space, though the trick is keeping it private enough so nobody stumbles on it and I accidentally distribute copyrighted material.

      I use OneDrive for that. I pay the $80/year option which includes Office (word, excel, powerpoint) for five people, and 5 terabytes of storage - easily enough for all my MP3s and also the DVDs that I've ripped. I use the OneDrive app on windows and mac to automatically sync files between laptop and cloud storage.

      I also wrote some software which uses the OneDrive "share link" feature to produce a .m3u playlist of all the cloud music. I imported this playlist into iTunes. It lets my iTunes stream directly off

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Merk42 ( 1906718 )
      From TFA, emphasis mine.

      Once the [Google Play] Music Store is no longer available, users will continue to be able to upload any tracks purchased elsewhere to YouTube Music.

      • I've heard YouTube Music wasn't very good, but most importantly, when these stories came out a few months ago about the switch, I was under the impression that you would need to pay to be able to upload. There was no free option to stream your own music. If that's changed (or was incorrect to begin with), then I'd be willing to check it out at least. Though I suspect based on the frequency of youtube ads these days, I probably won't be so happy with youtube music ads. But I'll take a look. Thanks

        • Oh, you can transfer your music for free all right, but just try to browse it with the phone app or on desktop. It's more fun to run head first into a wall. Horrible.

      • OK, that was quick. Without paying the monthly fee, I can't even lock the phone or switch to another app without it stopping playback. That option was good for about 10 seconds.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by racuna ( 911658 )
      I have my whole collection (about 140gb) synced between my laptops using Syncthing. But I don't know if there is a music app for Android that can stream from that.

      • MPD is an option that I've been using for streaming my collection to PDAs and then Smartphones for many many years. There's clients for everything and you can use icecast to stream to them. I don't recall what client I used on iOS, but on Android I was a big user of MPDroid for a time.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by brunes69 ( 86786 )

      What void? Everything is transferring to YouTube music, including your uploaded music.

    • Subsonic? Or a clone of subsonic like airsonic?

  • mandatory apps from google (Score:3)

    by sjwest ( 948274 ) on Tuesday August 04, 2020 @11:57AM (#60365435)

    Does that mean google will allow you to uninstall the app - i somehow doubt that.

    • Does that mean google will allow you to uninstall the app - i somehow doubt that.

      Was it shipped with the phone? Then no. Pre-loaded apps are burnt into the read only section of the firmware. The disable feature in Android simply uninstalls any updates, blocks updates for the app, and hides the icon. You'd need a new OS image to remove the app itself.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by sjwest ( 948274 )

        Oh well more google crap that does nothing any more for the user or google.

        Its interesting that google apps procreate and can never be removed but firefox and 'user' apps can. I am sure ios is as bad.

        The joys of family tech support eh

        • It's nothing to do with Google crap propagating and everything to do with the apps shipped initially in the phone image by the vendor. e.g. I can remove Google Chrome just fine on my phone, just like I can remove Firefox, but I can't remove the Samsung Browser because it was shipped with my phone. I can remove Google Drive but I can't remove Dropbox. I can remove Google Hangouts, but not Skype.

          Google went out of their way in Android to specifically create a feature that allows you to disable these apps whic

      • Pre-loaded apps are burnt into the read only section of the firmware. The disable feature in Android simply uninstalls any updates, blocks updates for the app, and hides the icon. You'd need a new OS image to remove the app itself.

        I'd expect that if your device gets upgrades, at some point you'll get a new system image that doesn't have the Google Music app. Since it seems likely that the next dessert release (which is already in beta) will launch before Google Music shuts down, it may not be until the 2021 upgrade.

  • Are you enjoying this, everyone? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Rick Schumann ( 4662797 ) on Tuesday August 04, 2020 @12:23PM (#60365543) Journal
    Are you enjoying all these various 'cloud' services, that may as well be coded on a dry-erase marker board for all the permanence they seem to have? Having to move all your stuff around every so often because such-and-such 'service' decides to go belly-up on you? Instead of just keeping your own music files in this case on something local that you have control over?
    Not that I care. Just asking for a friend.

    • Yes I am enjoying this. The difference is not having anything physical in these cloud services, so there's nothing to move. But hey even if I had something physical, no doubt moving things around every few years is still an order of magnitude simpler than either setting up my own* cloud service or handling physical media. When I think to the countless hours I burnt ripping CDs to MP3 so I could load them onto my MP3 player I don't for a moment pine for those days, and if moving media between a cloud service

      • You're an edge case. How many people have so much music that they want instant access to anywhere that they'd need to set up their own private internet server just to access it themselves? Not many. PMPs were more than adequate for the vast majority of people who even wanted music with them everywhere they went.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by DogDude ( 805747 )
          I have some MP3s on my MP3 player and my car that I update whenever I get a new CD. It's not time consuming. I also have an FTP server at home where I can get access to the entire collection. Much easier than having to deal with "cloud" services that make everything difficult.

          And, how in the heck do you play music when there's no Internet connection if all you use is "cloud"?

        • I'm an edge case only in my capability of setting up my own server. I am definitely not an edge case in that I have bought enough CDs over the years to find the effort required to move from one service to another smaller than the effort to manage physical copies of things I've bought.

          An average user would have only have bought 2-3 CDs in their entire life and ripped them to their music player to have come up with the same inconvenience as migrating from one cloud service to another.

    • Re:Are you enjoying this, everyone? (Score:5, Insightful)

      by ljw1004 ( 764174 ) on Tuesday August 04, 2020 @02:21PM (#60366009)

      Are you enjoying all these various 'cloud' services, that may as well be coded on a dry-erase marker board for all the permanence they seem to have? Having to move all your stuff around every so often because such-and-such 'service' decides to go belly-up on you? Instead of just keeping your own music files in this case on something local that you have control over? Not that I care. Just asking for a friend.

      I used to keep my mp3 and photo library on my own server from 2002 to 2014 that lived in a closet in the basement. Through that time I had to rebuild the server a few times (due to the machine just getting old, fan failing, other bits failing), update its RAID hard drives more times, be linux sysadmin for it, stay on top of security updates since I wanted my music accessible over the internet. It allowed some nice measure of tweaking which I enjoyed - I wrote several scripts to generate playlists, and thumbnails of my photos, and change the "genre" tag of all MP3s. I didn't enjoy having to go to the closet to make backups, didn't enjoy keeping track of the backups, and slowed down to only taking backups every 3 months. I did indeed lose 2 months of data (mp3s that I'd recorded from the internet and didn't consider that vital) on one occasion.

      But in the end, with children and busy job, I just didn't have time to continue to maintain my own hardware nor continue being sysadmin nor do regular backups and store them in physically different places. I switched everything over to OneDrive. It has remained there unchanged with no problems, and over the years Microsoft has increased the storage allowance. I've been delighted with it.

  • That's all, every free service I got from google, Microsoft, Apple ends.

    I going to buy a bunch of big usb and microsd memories that I will but in my phones and car, computer.

  • Add to Playlist... (Score:3)

    by xanadu113 ( 657977 ) on Tuesday August 04, 2020 @12:35PM (#60365595)
    Now if they could just fix YouTube Music so if you try to add a song to a playlist, and it's already on there, it'll notify you. Like it does on Google Play Music....
    • Offline mode. Like, they are aware most of America has jack and shit for cellphone coverage once you get away from the interstate or a major metro, right?

  • Youtube Music (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Luthair ( 847766 ) on Tuesday August 04, 2020 @12:54PM (#60365663)
    • Strangely YouTube Music doesn't allow users to use Chromecast Audio, even for music you purchased from Google.
    • Youtube Music on the web doesn't allow the user to prevent videos from playing
    • As music videos are shown to the user many songs have large amounts of video cruft at the beginning and the end.
    • It seems to prefer the radio edits, even if you do not have their explicit filter enabled

    For me the first point is enough for me to not use the service, I imagine I'll do the transfer at some point anyway but I'll probably just add music support to the media server I wrote.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Anonymous Coward

      • Strangely YouTube Music doesn't allow users to use Chromecast Audio, even for music you purchased from Google.
      • Youtube Music on the web doesn't allow the user to prevent videos from playing
      • As music videos are shown to the user many songs have large amounts of video cruft at the beginning and the end.
      • It seems to prefer the radio edits, even if you do not have their explicit filter enabled

      For me the first point is enough for me to not use the service, I imagine I'll do the transfer at some point anyway but I'll probably just add music support to the media server I wrote.

      It's because Google is a mismanaged piece of shit that has probably died but is so goddamn massive that it doesn't know it (but we can tell from the fucking stench of it's starting-to-rot corpse).

    • I use Chromecast Audio to listen to my music when I'm home, so the lack of support for it is why I recently installed Spotify. Not sure if I can add my purchased music to Spotify, I'm still learning it. Google already killed off production of Chromecast Audio, so I'll probably have to switch to using Bluetooth soon.

    • Bizarrely, you can't sort by artist in the library section.

  • I've used Play Music from almost day 1. I love it. I have transferred to youtube music and can say that it did not transfer everything perfectly. Specifically the likes, which it needs for its algo to recommend music.

  • YouTube music not avail for kids (Score:3, Interesting)

    by reynolds_john ( 242657 ) on Tuesday August 04, 2020 @01:21PM (#60365731)

    Google Play Music allowed the family plan to be distributed to my kids. YouTube Music does not - they're effectively blocked due to their age, and there's nothing I can do... Google won't allow you to install it on any device they have; Family Link blocks it no matter what.

    I can appreciate the effort by Google, but that, combined with the otherwise clumsy interface, was enough to push me back to Spotify.

    • I have no idea WTF google is doing with kids music. I get they don't want kids to access 'bad' parts of youtube music, i guess? But if you play a song which is marked as 'for kids' it wont let you browser you library anymore. So if i want to play music for my kids via a BT speaker, and then choose the next song to play while the first plays, it will stop.

      You can't turn this off. God forbid i wanted to listen to 'the wiggles' as an adult for any reason and have the ability to view my other music while listen

      • They have YouTube for Kids (https://youtube.com/kids/) but it's a travesty.
        I'm not sure what the purpose is. Kids can see all kinds of incredible violence on network TV every day of the week, but can't hear a curse word in a song? Doesn't make sense. Either way, I think I should be given the option.

  • I used a service called "free your music" a while back to transfer my playlists to spotify. Didn't get everything, but better than having to make them from scratch.

  • I tried to use it but the quality was terrible with very low dynamic range. Not worth listening to.

  • Finally!! https://hiphopza.com/ [hiphopza.com]
  • This is the last straw. My new company is going to use Microsoft Office. You're a bunch of zero-attention, customer-hostile ferrets. I hope a new search engine comes around and takes your golden goose away.
  • I've only bought one album from Google Music, which I was then able to locate the MP3s. Glad I didn't buy more. Normally I just buy the CD so that I have an archive of uncompressed music, but in this case it was really expensive and Google was the only service selling the album.
  • Did the transfer from GPM to YTM. Oh look. Missing artwork...no way to edit meta data. Some albums did not transfer. They said, 'oh just hit transfer again.' Only the stuff that didn't transfer will move, and you'll fix it.' INcorrect. All 18000 songs........duped. DUPED, I tell you. Which is what I feel like. Anyway, it also does not have the totally logical "Sort Albums A-Z" like Google Photos FINALLY added after, what, five years? So...all my songs are organized on Google Drive. And ALSO on OneDrive.

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