Although the application is pre-installed on all Google Play Certified Android smartphones, Google Play Music has struggled to compete with name stays like Spotify, Apple Music, iHeartRadio, and Pandora. A recent Business Insider chart places Google Play Music's market share at a rather lackluster 6% compared to Pandora's 32% and Spotify's 18%. According to a recent report, Google is ready to pull the plug on Google Play Music to make way for another streaming service. This news comes courtesy of Droid-Life, who is reporting that Google will launch a music-focused service called YouTube Remix to replace Play Music.

This service has actually been in the works for some time, as we first heard rumors of a YouTube-branded streaming service date all the way back in December 2017. According to the rumors, YouTube Remix will be taking a different approach to music streaming than Google Play Music by focusing on better recommendations as well as adding the ability to play clips along with the music. YouTube executives earlier confirmed the existence of Remix, adding that it merges the best of both Play Music and YouTube and that they're "making an enormous investment to launch a product that you will be proud of."

With the time invested into YouTube Remix's development, as well as the current state of development of Play Music, it makes sense that the latter will eventually be phased out and rolled into the new application to streamline Google's music efforts. What is not sure, however, is the process for how Google Play Music would be phased out in favor of YouTube Remix, as the report only mentioned that Google would be doing a "forced adoption" by the end of this year. We hope that users' existing Play Music catalog will be seamlessly transitioned over to the new service. A spokesperson for YouTube sent the following statement to Droid-Life, which reassured us that they won't suddenly pull the plug out from under us, but it still didn't answer the question about how the transition will occur.

We’ve previously announced the combination of the YouTube Music and Google Play product teams — music is very important to Google so it’s critical we have one offering that meets the needs of consumers and artists. Nothing will change for users today and we’ll provide plenty of notice before any changes are made.

We hope to learn more about Remix in the coming weeks, hopefully at Google I/O.


Source: Droid Life