Music Store no longer available on Google Play

If you’ve been living under a rock the past few months and today you suddenly decided to buy some music through Google Play Music, you might have gotten an unpleasant surprise when you went to the Play Store. That’s because the long-planned deprecation of Google Play Music has taken a huge step today. You’ll see the announcement “The music store on Google Play Music is no longer available”. This is one of the major steps towards totally removing the long-standing music app and replacing it finally with music streaming app YouTube Music.

Don’t panic just yet if you still had files that you haven’t backed up and transferred as you still have a couple of months to do so. You will officially lose access to Google Play Music by the end of the year. So from now until December, you should already start moving on with your digital music life as there are a lot of options out there anyway. Google will of course want you to seamlessly move to YouTube Music.

Over the past months, we’ve seen Google’s new music app slowly (sometimes too slowly for some) achieve feature parity with Google Play Music. The last piece that they’re hoping to convince users to move was the ability to upload their own music files and access them from other devices that have the YouTube Music app. You’re supposed to be able to upload up to 100 thousand tracks so that shouldn’t be a problem.

But if you decide to take your music somewhere else, you can use Google Takeout which will let you downed music that you perviously purchased from Google Play Music. You can also backup your music wishlist and reviews, and a list of the tracks, playlists, and radio stations that were in your library. It will probably take you some time to rebuild your music library but that’s the price of going outside the Google ecosystem.

You can also just go ahead and start fresh on another music app so you have the option to just delete all your data on Google Play Music. With the death of the ability to buy music, Google has officially accepted that streaming music is the way to go right now. Whether that is good or bad depends on your perspective on how music should be consumed of course.

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