Google Play Music is shutting down for everyone in October

Google Play Music service in the United Kingdom (UK) will shut down in October, the focus will be on its newer YouTube Music app.

Google Play Music failed to attract as many subscribers as rivals such as Spotify and Apple Music, despite being pre-installed as the default music app on millions of Android phones.

YouTube Music will offer more than 60 million songs to stream, but will not have a download store to buy music.

One analyst said focusing on the YouTube brand was the ‘right strategy’.

“They changed the name several times. There was Google Play All Access, YouTube Music Key, and it speaks to the underlying issue that this has not been an area of focus for Google.”

Google slowly added new features to YouTube Music to convince people to migrate from Play Music, and more recently, introduced a migration tool to transfer your songs, albums, and playlists.

The goal was to get people to fully migrate to YouTube so that Google can shut down its music app.

According to the official YouTube blog post, the final stage of Play Music’s shutdown will go in September in New Zealand and South Africa and October for the rest of the world, you won’t be able to use Play Music anymore.

Google will, however, still hold onto your Play Music data until December so you still have time to migrate all your uploads, playlists, and purchases over to YouTube Music, or if you have any podcasts, to Google Podcasts.

The other way you can save your content is to use Google Takeout to download all your purchased and uploaded content. The tech giant will notify you before you lose access to what’s on your Play Music account.