Google Play Music launches thousands of songs when closing its Artist Hub

GOOGLE ANNOUNCED the closure of his Artist Hub, designed to make it easier for Google Play Music to access smaller labels and unsigned artists.

This news is the first clue that we reach the end of the game for Play Music. The launch of YouTube Music at the end of 2017 was supposed to announce that it would eventually replace the previous music store, but the change has been long, Google seems to have a hard time offering parity of functionality between the two services.

In particular, Google Play Music's existing MP3 purchases are not currently available and downloaded to YouTube Music, but there are also other items that have been sent off-line.

Artist Hub users received an email warning them that all their content would be deleted from the end of the month. As such, they will have to download it again from a third-party distributor.

YouTube has an equivalent program, YouTube for Artists, and Google encourages people to sign up, but there is no migration program because it would be really reasonable and courteous.

Although we know that this would happen at some point, the fact that the first victims are small artists is a bit irritating. In addition, the fact that hundreds of thousands of songs are no longer available on Google Play Music, but are not automatically available on YouTube Music is a crush on artists and subscribers.

As we reported yesterday, streaming accounts for almost 50% of global music revenue and it seems likely that YouTube Music will be dedicated exclusively to streaming. This raises the question of what will become not only the purchases, but also the 50,000-song download folder offered by Play Music.

As Microsoft closes its e-book store this week and pledges to remove user libraries without migration, the ephemeral nature of the services provided by tech giants is becoming a source of concern.

Our advice would be, if you have the means, to save everything locally. We begin to see that the clouds are coming and the clouds are disappearing. μ

Further reading