Google Play Music to make way for YouTube Music by year end; users can move playlists via Takeout

The Google Play Music app will be shutting down by the end of the year, leaving users with a few months' time to transfer their playlists over to YouTube Music. Though the replacement was being teased for quite a while now, the tech giant has now outlined the exact timeline of events to come.Google announced the timeline in a YouTube blog post on 4 August. The change will begin with New Zealand and South Africa, with the music programme shutting off there by September 2020, it said. For other global markets, people will have time till October 2020 to enjoy the online streaming services of Google Play Music. However, customized choices made on the application will remain stored till December, so users have till the end of 2020 to transfer their music libraries between the two platforms.Back in May, Google had introduced a process to seamlessly transfer music libraries and playlists over to YouTube Music. Here's a look at how you can make the transfer.The changes are going to begin sooner than expected, what with Google no longer accepting any purchase or pre-order requests, and removing the option to upload or download music from Google Play Music via Music Manager starting late August."To ensure users don’t lose any of their content, they’ll need to use the simple transfer tool to migrate any purchases over to YouTube Music or use Google Takeout to export data and download their purchased and uploaded music," the blog read.In case you would like to start your journey with the new app on a clean slate, Google is giving users the chance to completely delete their Google Play Music data as well. The tech giant has mentioned that it will be giving ample notifications before you lose access to your old library and other data.With Google removing music from the app store, the firm now has no official platform for users to buy music, unlike its competitors Apple and Amazon.That said, users will have the option of buying it from some other platform and uploading it to YouTube Music. In order to make the shuffle lucrative, Google has also added many new features to YouTube Music.To name a few, there are now three types of playlists that a user can create – based upon their personalized signals or taste on the platform, new releases or a shared playlist. For an easier control and navigation, a new Explore Tab has been also introduced.