There’s a ton of music streaming apps out there. And now, Google has joined the trend and created their own. Well, they created a lot more than just one. There are two Google Music services: YouTube Music and Play Music. Let’s dive in and see what the differences are.
Updated on 9 December 2024
Play Music on Google
The first service is the older, and more well known, Google Play Music. I’m pretty sure you’ve heard of this since it is one of the biggest Google Music providers.
It lets you choose to upload your own music or to pay a monthly subscription to get access to over 40 million songs. It has a bunch of radio stations, curated playlists, and a podcast station where you can choose from different ones and subscribe to them.
YouTube Music
With YouTube, you get to watch millions of music videos from all the famous songs of all time. If you choose to go with Youtube Premium, you can watch all the videos you want ad-free!
But, they also have a service solely for playing music called YouTube Music. Similar to the previous service, it also has personalized radio stations, curated playlists, and a personal music library. And you can also get Premium if you want to get rid of ads and unlock some of their cool features.
Play Music on Google is About to Disappear
Two years ago, Google announced that they will be merging Google Play Music with YouTubeRed (also known as YouTube Premium).
As of now, there is no solid date for when this merge would happen. But Google made sure to alert indie artists of this change ahead of time. In addition, the new music app will still have the same services that were present in the old one. But, of course, it will have a few new features as well.
The Big Problem
With all these new changes, users are having trouble transferring from one service to another. Of course, there are a lot of customers who would want to keep their playlists that they’ve painstakingly made for years.
Sometime in June 2018, Google said that they were working on a feature to help out on this. But it’s now been a year later, and they still haven’t delivered on this promise. As expected, a lot of Google Music users were annoyed because they simply want to make the switch quickly without having to lose anything.
Google Music users are also having problems with their family plans. In the new YouTube app, it automatically disabled the kids’ account because it doesn’t support children’s accounts yet.
Both YouTube Music Premium and YouTube Premium are billed through YouTube itself. But if you also have Google Play Music, it is billed through Google Play. So, in other words, you could very possibly end up paying for double subscriptions.
The Verdict
Since everything is still a mess, it would be best to just stick with Google Play Music for now. YouTube doesn’t let you buy music directly yet or get access to all the local audio files. However, this is very subject to change soon enough.
