Wave Goodbye To Another Google Product; Google Music Is Going Silent

Make Sure That It Isn’t The Only Place You Saved That Music

Like it or not, if you have been using Google Music as your audio player of choice you are going to have to get used to YouTube music before the end of the year.  Google has been warning users of Google Music’s impending doom for a few months now and Ars Technica has posted a timeline of what to expect.  Towards the end of the month you will no longer be able to upload new music to your collection, nor purchase any new music from the store.   New Zealand and South Africa will be the first to lose the ability to stream music in September, with the remainder of the world being cut off by the end of October and that will also be when the app disappears from the online store.

In December all your music will be deleted.

If you don’t have all of your music stored locally you should look into resolving that issue sooner, rather than later.  Google Music Manager is available for Windows and Mac and will offer an easy to use interface to download a copy of your collection, or you can request all your music be zipped and downloaded via Google Takeout, if you want to test how quickly Google can zip up gigabytes of audio files.

In the meantime you should look at transferring your collection to YouTube Music, which Google has made relatively painless as they really would like people to start using that application.  Sadly it will also insert any YouTube videos which could possibly be described as audio into your stream if you have previously liked, or probably even just watched.  Obviously this could be somewhat jarring depending on how broad that applications algorithms are.  As a bonus feature, you will no longer be able to send audio to your Google Home smart speakers without forking over money for a subscription.