Navigating a music library is far better now, with basic things like sorting albums from A to Z (instead of by recent additions) is thankfully present now. At this point, though, most Play Music holdouts should feel pretty comfortable switching over, in my opinion - basically all the deal-breaking problems I originally encountered have been fixed. We don’t know exactly when, but the writing is clearly on the wall at this point. Google Play Music will continue working for the time being, so if a user goes back to the old service for a while and wants to initiate a new transfer of their account, they can do it as many times as they want.Īt the same time as Google launched this transition tool, it also confirmed that Play Music will shut down for good this year. Google will send both an email and a push notification once everything is complete. In a demo with Google last week, a demo transfer of a account with more than 10,000 songs and many more playlists happened in just about the same amount of time.Īs the transfer happens, you’ll find a banner on the YouTube Music homepage highlighting things it pulled over from the old service, and you can use the app while the transition is in progress. I was able to transfer my modest collection of about 8,500 songs, 131 saved stations and about 30 playlists in 15 minutes. But even libraries with tens of thousands of songs shouldn’t take very long to port over.
Of course, edge cases with massive music libraries or tons of uploads can take much longer, up to a few days. Google says this whole transfer process will take place in steps, but the whole thing should take less than an hour. But, if you’ve never used YouTube Music at all, your Google Play Music history will provide a basis for surfacing albums and playlists you may not have heard yet. For me, that’ll be YouTube Music, as my Google Play Music account has been largely dormant for months now. If you’ve been using both services, YouTube Music will use recency to decide what’s most important - so whatever you’ve been playing lately or giving thumbs up to most recently will be the main recommendation drivers. In fact, all of your Google Play Music history that built the recommendations for you on that one service will also make it to YouTube Music. That data will be used to curate recommendations for you on the YouTube Music home screen. It’ll also bring over “many” of the curated stations Play Music offered, as most of those have been recreated on YouTube Music as playlists.Īll the details on what songs you’ve given a thumbs-up or thumbs-down will be ported over, too. Any songs you bought through Google Play or anything you uploaded from your own music library will be ported over, as well.
You can port over every song and album in your library, as well as any playlists you’ve created. I’m impressed with the depth of detail Google put into this process. Inside the app you’ll find a banner alerting you to the option to port your entire Google Play Music library over, and just a few taps from there will get it started.
If you haven’t downloaded the app yet, Google Play Music will alert you to the new transition tool and prompt you to install YouTube Music.
To start the process off, you’ll obviously need to have YouTube Music on your Android or iOS device.
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