Google Play Music Is Dead. Long Live Spotify and Apple Music
As another product bites the dust, Google now stands at the risk of killing its own music business
We knew this was coming. Google had been planning to draw curtains over their decade-old music and podcast streaming service for a while now.
Now when the time has finally arrived, this all feels so sudden. However, it isn’t too surprising. The search engine giant has such a long history of discontinuing products that there’s a whole graveyard named after them.
Yet, seeing the doom of Google Play Music really hurts. After all, only last year, it was the default music player app shipped across millions of Android devices.
Today as Google begins forcing users to switch over to the newer YouTube Music app, it's hard to digest the fact that the much-loved Google Music product is officially dead.
Now, this would have been fine if YouTube Music was an equal substitution for Google Play Music. But the thing is, currently, YT Music doesn’t fill that void. Instead, it's a service that primarily focuses on boosting video viewing time rather than music playlists.
This makes Google’s whole strategy of replacing a working product by shoehorning it into another one a…
