It’s time to bid farewell to Google Play Music: The service is winding down later this year. It’s been around since 2011, which means if you’re a regular user you’ve probably built up a healthy store of tunes on Google’s servers.
While Google Play Music will be with us no longer, YouTube Music is taking its place as Google’s music offering. And if you act before the service shuts down, you can seamlessly transfer your entire Google Play Music library—including your recommendations, purchased songs and personal uploads—to YouTube Music. Google has made this process incredibly easy, provided you’re ready to jump ship to a YouTube Music subscription.
If you aren’t ready to make that leap—perhaps you’re exploring switching to a non-Google music service?—hold off on the transfer; you’ll just have to do it all again once Google Play Music finally turns off the lights. Why waste time transferring your data twice?
How to move from Google Play Music to YouTube Music on the web
The easiest way to transfer everything over is to visit YouTube’s dedicated page for transferring your Google Play Music account.
Once you’ve visited the site, log in (if you aren’t already) and then click “Transfer.” That’s it!
Depending on how much content you have stored on Google Play Music, the transfer can take anywhere between a few seconds to a few days. Also, this entire process process may not even be available for your account right now. If it’s not, and you try to use it anyway, Google will send you a notification when it’s ready for you to transfer your data.
Once you do get in and initiate the transfer, you’ll receive both email and phone notifications letting you know when the transfer is complete.
If you’re a current Google Play Music subscriber, your payment info and account information will also transfer over with all your stuff. Google says that most users will even experience the same billing date, but if you’re grandfathered in with an older Google Play Music promotion, you’ll have to pay a little extra for the $US10 ($15)/month YouTube Music subscription.
How to move from Google Play Music to YouTube Music on your phone
To get started, download the YouTube Music app for Android or iOS. Open the app. On the main screen, you should see a banner that says “Transfer your Play Music library.” Tap that to start the process. If you don’t see the banner, you can go into the app’s settings to find the “Transfer from Google Play Music” option.
From there, follow the onscreen instructions to finish the process on mobile. If you don’t get the transfer option no matter how much searching you do and you’re running the latest version of the app, Google might still be waiting to roll the feature out to you. Give it a few days and check again.
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