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Google is making a big mistake killing Play Music for YouTube Music
July 16, 2025
We’ve known for a while now that Google was readying a plot forGoogle Play Musicin theGoogle graveyard. Nevertheless, it was still a bit of a surprise when the company announced that it wouldditch Play Musicfor itsYouTube Musicservice before the end of 2020.
Put bluntly: YouTube Music isn’t a music app, it’s a way to increase YouTube viewing minutes.
Singing a different tune
Let’s run through just a few of the ways YouTube Music fails as aSpotifyandApple Musicrival and, more crucially, as a Google Play Music replacement.
For starters, Google hasn’t implemented the ability to fully disable autoplay functionality almost two years after its launch. This is possible for playlists, but what if you want to listen to a single track? Then you’ll need to create a playlist solely for that track. You can disable autoplay if you want to watch a single video onYouTube, but not YouTube Music.
Read more:YouTube Music vs YouTube Premium vs YouTube Music Premium explained!
Google has improved YouTube Music’s offline capabilities, but it’s still a long way from matching Google Play Music’s offline mode. Here, Play Music adopts an app-wide offline mode, with the various app screens showing your offline content. But YouTube Music is content to simply direct you to your downloads page, with other tabs rendered mostly useless.
YouTube Music does offer Smart Downloads (automatically downloading your favorite content) and the ability to download a “liked” playlist. But this definitely pales in comparison to Google Play Music’s functionality, offering automatic playlists (e.g. last added, thumbs up, purchased) and the ability to cache while streaming.
Sure, many of these gimped or missing features might not be intentional. It’s also great that themusic lockerfeature is finally coming to YouTube Music as outside ofclient-server streaming platforms like Plex, Play Music was one of the only ways that avid collectors can stream their private collections.
However, all of the aforementioned lacking or intrusive features illustrate the gulf in how Google views Play Music versus YouTube Music.
A move to benefit YouTube
The search giant’s decision to simply kill off Google Play Music in favor of YouTube Music isn’t a surprise given the company’s reported obsession with engagement at any cost. Roughly a year ago,Bloombergreportedthat YouTube employees were told not to “rock the boat” after they raised concerns about toxic video recommendations.
In fact, one computer scientist interviewed by the outlet says he told YouTube that their recommendation engine was an “addiction engine.” The scientist felt that Google didn’t express any desire to change this system. This only serves as more evidence that Google is perhaps willing to do almost anything for YouTube engagement, so why not kill a beloved app too?
Google could’ve simply rebranded Google Play Music to YouTube Music instead, or considering Google’s recent attempts to bring all of its services back under the Google name withNest,Android Pay, and therumored Android TV rebrand, why not just Google Music?
It’s not like Play Music didn’t already have YouTube video integration either. You’d think that deeper yet more thoughtful integration of YouTube’s vast library would’ve been possible without such drastic measures.
Between Google killing a perfectly good app and its quest for higher YouTube engagement figures, it’s a good thing that there areplenty of alternativesfor those that want more “Music” and less “YouTube” from their music streaming apps.
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