Google Play Music’s not dead yet for everyone, but the end has begun for some

We’ve known this was coming for quite some time. If you are like me, you’ve gone through rejecting the idea of moving away to embracing it to rejecting it again several times over. It’s been a solid year since Google made it clear that their older (and somewhat beloved) Play Music service would be retired in favor of the new, upstart (at the time) YouTube Music. We’ve had time and Google honestly put together a very solid method of moving music libraries from GPM to YTM and extended the free upload music library to 100,000 songs on the new service, so all-in-all they made the path to moving pretty simple.

But, it seems the final days are now upon us for Google Play Music and we are beginning to see new splash screens on Google Play Music apps and on the web that won’t allow any functionality from the older service and instead only point you to manage your library and/or check out YouTube Music. We’ve known the day was coming, but it still stings a little bit.

For my main account , Google Play Music is still alive and fine. From what we can tell thus far, this forced transition will be a server-side update, so your mileage may vary depending on your account. I was able to get the dreaded ‘no longer available’ splash screens on other Google accounts that I didn’t have a Google Play Music library established in, so this is definitely happening differently for different users. On both the desktop and on my phone, switching accounts brought me to the end of the line with GPM. It seems to be the case that longer-term GPM users are getting a bit more time to finalize the transition, but we’d advise you not wait around much longer to just up and move.

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Moving on

Look, as we said, this has been coming and the warnings have been clear. This isn’t a shock or a surprise and, for the most part, Google has cleaned up the main issues with YouTube Music. Are there still issues when compared with Google Play Music? Absolutely. I still want a stinking cast button in the web player for crying out loud. And there are other complaints littered here and there that – if the past few months are any indication – will get tidied up relatively soon. Alternatively, there are other options available to you if YouTube Music isn’t your, erm, jam. I tried Spotify, Apple Music and Amazon Music for a few weeks and realized pretty quickly that all the streaming services out there have quirks and things I don’t like. At the end of the day, I became comfortable with the quirks that GPM came with and made peace with that and that’s why as a music streaming service, it felt like home.

As I’ve forced myself to use YTM more and more, I’m coming to terms with the way this service works and I’m more and more happy with it as time goes on. As Google continues to hone the experience over time, I’m happy to figure it out as we go. After all, I love YouTube Premium and the ad-free experience you get from it, so it makes a lot of sense to get my music streaming service bundled into the same monthly payment, right? Anyway, I guess it’s time to say a final goodbye to GPM. It was a good run.