YouTube Music transfer tool starts the Google Play Music shutdown journey

Google Play Music is starting the process of transitioning subscribers to YouTube Music, with a new library transfer tool promising to make it easy to switch over ahead of the shutdown later in 2020. Google announced that Google Play Music would be retiring some time back, but it has been slowly adding features to YouTube Music – as well as making the transfer process more seamless – to actually make that happen.

The good news is that there’s no great urgency, at least not yet. Google Play Music isn’t expected to actually shut down until later this year, Google has said, and the new transfer tool launched today is just the first step on the road to that.

With it, you’ll be able to not only move your music library over to YouTube Music, but your playlists and your personal taste preferences too. “For now, users will continue to have access to both services,” Google says. “We want to ensure everyone has time to transfer their content and get used to YouTube Music, so we’ll provide plenty of notice ahead of users no longer having access to Google Play Music later this year.”

If you’re a Google Play Music user, you’ll get an email soon with instructions on how to start the transfer. You’ll need the YouTube Music app – which is available for iOS and Android – within which you’ll find a new “Transfer” button has appeared. Clicking that will move all uploads, purchases, added songs and albums, personal and subscribed playlists, likes and dislikes, curated stations, and personal taste preferences across.

Updated recommendations will appear immediately on the YouTube Music home screen. An email and notification later on will confirm when the full music library has been transferred, since that will take a little longer. At that point, it will be visible in the “Library” tab.

Podcasts, meanwhile, will be handled differently. For those, Google is directing people to the Google Podcasts app, which is also available for iOS and Android. There’s a new page which automates transferring over subscriptions and episode progress from Google Play Music to Google Podcasts.

:story: SlashGear