Google will be replacing Google Play Music with YouTube Music on devices that run Android 10 OS. The search engine announced that the app will come pre-installed on all future devices that run Android 10 out of the box.
The update will also be applied to smartphones that ship out with Android 9 Pie (via an OTA update, no doubt), plus devices under the Google Pixel series. To be clear, Google isn’t planning on entirely getting rid of Google Play Music just yet, as the service still isn’t quite ready for people wish to transfer their entire music library over to YouTube Music.
YouTube Music first launched in 2015, but has failed to garner much traction since its launch. Google currently has more than two billion YouTube monthly users, so it would make sense that the search engine would want to try and monetise on that number turn some, if not all of them into paying subscribers.
As it stands, the number of YouTube Music subscribers stands at a little more than 15 million subscribers; a fraction of the number of YouTube users. By comparison, both Apple and Spotify are the dominant players in the music streaming industry, having 60 and 108 million paying subscribers, respectively.
(Source: YouTube Blog via Techspot, The Verge // Image: Techspot)
