It’s the final countdown! << insert the catchy "Europe" popcorn-rock song here >>. February 24 in 2021 is the final deletion date for your Google Play Music (aka GPM) music and data. On that day, everything will be gone and it won’t be recoverable! Google just sent an email with this warning to everyone with a Google account and music data or activity…
As I mentioned in our September 2020 post, you have options to download your music and/or transfer it to YouTube music… Or you can traverse the Google Support pages for more info…
You can download your music, things you purchases, things you got as freebies ($0.00 price) and things you uploaded yourself. You can download these using the Google Takeover service.
OF TRANSFERS and CHANNELS
You can also transfer your music ownership to the “YouTube Music” service and app. This will attempt to match whatever it finds in your GPM account and map it over to YouTube Music. As usual with these type of things, some things may not map over, so if you have a lot of unusual/rare music, you may want to use Google Takeout as well just to be on the safe side. Storage is getting cheaper by the minute these days anyway.
You can also transfer your “music data” to GPM, including your Playlists and your Recommendations. There is a catch though, you need to create a “YouTube Channel” and by default it will use your name (the name of your Google account). So if you want privacy and such, make the necessary adjustments. More on these in our GPM Restore your Playlists post also of September 2020.
NOT familiar with “YOUTUBE MUSIC”?
I’s a bit like YouTube in that you can play almost everything but you will be subjected to ads. Ads. Ads. Ads. If you want to get rid of ads, you have to sign up for “YouTube Music Premium” (music ad-free) or for “YouTube Premium” which costs a little bit more but offers both YouTube Music and YouTube ad-free and with download and background playback options.
If you have multiple members in your household and/or have multiple personal YouTube accounts (eg one personal, one for work, one for a deep-dive hobby, etc), you can sign up for the Family plans that gives you this benefit on up to six accounts. If you spend a lot of time on YouTube and such, it may be worth it. Just think of how much time you’d be savings not seeing stupidly annoying ads and clicking furiously to “Skip Ads”.
Premium also helps the creators a little bit in that a fraction of your monthly payment goes to them.