Google says this whole transfer process will take place in steps, but the whole thing should take less than an hour. Of course, edge cases with massive music libraries or tons of uploads can take much longer, up to a few days. But even libraries with tens of thousands of songs shouldn’t take very long to port over. I was able to transfer my modest collection of about 8,500 songs, 131 saved stations and about 30 playlists in 15 minutes. In a demo with Google last week, a demo transfer of a account with more than 10,000 songs and many more playlists happened in just about the same amount of time.

As the transfer happens, you’ll find a banner on the YouTube Music homepage highlighting things it pulled over from the old service, and you can use the app while the transition is in progress. Google will send both an email and a push notification once everything is complete. Google Play Music will continue working for the time being, so if a user goes back to the old service for a while and wants to initiate a new transfer of their account, they can do it as many times as they want.

At the same time as Google launched this transition tool, it also confirmed that Play Music will shut down for good this year. We don’t know exactly when, but the writing is clearly on the wall at this point. At this point, though, most Play Music holdouts should feel pretty comfortable switching over, in my opinion — basically all the deal-breaking problems I originally encountered have been fixed. Navigating a music library is far better now, with basic things like sorting albums from A to Z (instead of by recent additions) is thankfully present now. Similarly, if you add a song or album to your library, the artists will show up under your artists list; you don’t have to “subscribe” separately to an artist channel.

This could also represent one of the last moves before Google Play Music shuts down. One of the tipsters indicated that Play Music could close “completely” in the second half of 2020. Google has long indicated that it would fold Google Play Music into YouTube Music once the main features were ported over, and that transition appears close at hand.

There’s no guarantee things will happen as reported. Google originally hoped to move users over in 2019, remember. It would be well-timed if it did, mind you. YouTube Music and YouTube Premium have a combined 20 million subscribers — that number will jump significantly if Google reels in Play Music converts, not to mention attracts those would-be customers who want access to their personal collections.

It almost goes without saying, but this is yet another step toward the impending demise of Google Play Music. The writing has been on the wall for a while. In April, for instance, Google shut down the app’s Artist Hub, which had allowed independent artists to uploaded their music for streaming on Google Play Music. In the email the company sent to artists, Google said the closure was due to YouTube Music and went on to encourage them to become YouTube Artists.

Still, If you’re fond of Google Play Music, it’s a tough pill to swallow. While YouTube Music has gotten better in recent months, it’s not yet as robust as Google Play Music. For example, it was only earlier this week that Google added a Discover Weekly-like feature to YouTube Music. Like with its messaging apps, it would be nice if Google picked a music app and stuck with it — and it looks like it’s doing so with YouTube Music, at least for now.

WWE Network 2.0: How WWE rebuilt its streaming service after a split with Disney
Chris Welch,
The Verge

After a flashy reveal at CES a few years ago, the WWE Network is by all accounts a success, amassing well over a million subscribers by early 2019. Disney threw a wrench in the plans when it bought BAMTech, the company that had successfully constructed streaming services for the likes of Major League Baseball and HBO Now. It was also what WWE relied on for its 24/7 buffet of choke slams and live events. WWE saw the writing on the wall, and rebuilt its streaming library from the ground up.

Even as subscription services eat up an ever-growing portion of the overall music business, Bloomberg and the Wall Street Journal report that Google’s packages are not expanding at the same rate. RIAA numbers showed subscription services added more than a million customers a month during 2018, meanwhile the Wall Street Journal cites sources claiming YouTube Music and Google Play Music subscriptions have been “essentially flat” over four recent months. While Spotify has over 100 million customers, the reported numbers put Google’s music offerings at 15 – 16 million.

Google told the outlets that subscription numbers and the reports of flat growth are inaccurate, and that as of March, combined subscribers to YouTube Premium and YouTube Music are up 60 percent over last year. Still, the numbers claimed by the sources paint an interesting picture as Google continues to slowly shift from Google Play Music to YouTube Music. A year after launching the YouTube-branded service, it’s only just adding features like the ability to play locally-stored songs and still has not replaced GPM’s cloud locker for user’s own music files.

Meanwhile, YouTube continues to be a way many people access music and music videos for free with Google’s ads. While it would certainly like to turn those folks into more paying subscribers, having that backdrop means that even with fewer customers, its potential is a bit different than the offerings from Apple, Spotify and Amazon.