Google signalled the end of Google Play Music a long time ago but feature parity has been a long time coming. One of the final bastions to be felled by Google is the transfer of your library from Google Play Music (GPM) over to YouTube Music. Well sing it from the roof tops because it is finally here.
Google have today announced that GPM listeners can “effortlessly” transfer their “music libraries, personal taste preferences and playlists to YouTube Music. Of course that does not mean that GPM is going anywhere….yet. They will still want to “ensure everyone has time to transfer their content and get used to YouTube Music” before they finally shutter it “later this year”.
The process can take up to a few hours if you have a lot of music with the faster-to-transfer items such as playlists, likes etc going first. When it is complete a notification will appear on your device along with an email in your inbox but if you are impatient you can always open the app to track its progress.
If you’ve used YouTube Music before you’ll know that they are able to sync the music in a song with the music in a video no matter how much fluff is included in the video to begin with — it will skip to the same part of the song in the video if you hit the video button.
So what’s new with YouTube Music
Along with the transfer of your music and tastes over, the limit to the amount of songs you can upload has been increase from 50,000 to 100,000 for YouTube Music. Along with you can now create playlists with up to 5,000 songs in the playlist, up from 1,000 on GPM.
Radio stations are out and music expert-made playlists are in and they’ve now been given pride of place, encouraging users to use them more often. We’ve covered all the other recent changes in the past few weeks with new lyrics and the Explore section.
Just how easy is it?
The process to transfer your music and entire library across seems to be fairly simple with Google offering us a demo of it occurring while in the media briefing. The steps are fairly simple:
- Update your version of YouTube Music to version 3.65.
- Click on the transfer button in YouTube Music and everything will be automatically transferred across.
- Next time you open YouTube Music some of your GPM content will be present on the front page.
- Your billing will also be transferred over to YouTube Music.
You can also perform the transfer on the desktop app in a similar manner.
What about the cost?
Those who already have a GPM subscription will be grandfathered over to YouTube Music and will be placed on an equivalent tier but continue to pay the same cost that they were at GPM. For those who are yet to sign up there is still the ad-supported free tier with the next level being YouTube Music Premium which gives listeners background listening, downloads and an ad-free experience for $11.99 a month.
That is not to be confused with YouTube Premium which will extend that ad-free, background listening and offline playback to all of YouTube — this will set you back $14.99. Family accounts are still supported and will be transferred over as above. Even if only one person from a family transfers their music over at this stage there will still only be the one fee for the family account.
There is still a 10 device authorisation limit but from now de-authorisations are performed automatically with the oldest dropping off first. It seems that at this stage that number of de-authorisations per year is still limited with YouTube Music as it was with GPM.
It is great to see what is possibly the last addition to YouTube Music make it over form GPM. IS there anything left that you’d like to see moved over or is this the final thing that will tip you over the edge into Google’s new default music listening service. It had better be because GPM is leaving us before the end of the year.
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.google.android.apps.youtube.music
Google Play Music has more songs and there’s no YouTube Music app for Android TV yet.
1. No Android TV app
2. Lots of albums still not on YTM…GPM music has more albums (but they did remove a few, which is weird)
what abt wear os app?
Will our song thumbs ups and downs be transferred? Is that what you meant by “taste preferences”?
Thumb ups is still a playlist, so i guess it will be transferred too
Will the grandfathered GPM subscriptions still retain YouTube Premium?
It seems to be a server side button to flick on. When it works you can also go to https://music.youtube.com/transfer
yeah, no transfer option for me yet either.
I really dont like YTMusic app, but if I have no choice,
may as well adapt.
Yeah don’t have the button yet…….
So if you’re grandfathered across at the GPM price tier will you still get the ad-free YouTube that would normally be only on the $15 YTM sub? :/
EDIT: nevermind, The Verge’s FAQ answered this for me
Do you have a link to the FAQ? I couldn’t find it. I’ve been on GPM family plan since the beginning and keen to know this answer too.
looks like they are yet to roll out it out in melbourne, my app doesnt have a transfer button yet
I love how you say ‘Melbourne’ as though it has a special place in the entirity of Australia.
Such a Victorian thing to say. 🤣
Nup, on the latest version 3.65.58 still not giving me the open. Desktop version says I’ll be notified once it’s available. I guess it’s another “staged” roll out
Is it just me, or are hardly any songs accompanied by their videos? I seem to get 1, and then many in a row that have no video, old and new tracks! Further, streaming to a TV/amp through a Chromecast works well but as soon as you try to do the same to the same Chromecast that’s in a group with speakers, bang no video! I get why, but really that’s a big and obvious miss for customer expectation. Only reason I’m not more annoyed about it is so few videos seem available