Google has confirmed that come 1 January 2021, Google Play Music will be fully closed down.
The app will cease to stream music to customers in New Zealand and South Africa in September, followed by the rest of the world in October.
From then till the end of the year, users of Google Play Music will be able to transfer their music libraries to YouTube Music, the app Google is replacing it with. If people don’t move their libraries during 2020, they will become unavailable into 2021.
Transferring your library over to Play Music will move and restore any music purchases you’ve made as well as your playlists. If you want to physically download your purchases you can do so using Google’s Takeout tool.
In addition to this, Google has announced that music will no longer be available to download at all from a Google service with the shuttering of Play Music. This change will happen in late August, and means there will no longer be a way to purchase or download music from Google.
If you want to move purchased music to YouTube Music, you’ll have to purchase it from another source and transfer it across.
Author: Henry Burrell, Phones Editor
Henry is Tech Advisor’s Phones Editor, ensuring he and the team covers and reviews every smartphone worth knowing about for readers and viewers all over the world. He spends a lot of time moving between different handsets and shouting at WhatsApp to support multiple devices at once.