YouTube Music will eventually get Google Play Music's best bits

With YouTube Music’s confusing slow-drip rollout already underway, the question turns to what will happen to Google Play Music. The answer turns out to be nothing, at least for the time being.

Speaking with The Verge, Google Play Music and YouTube Music product manager Elias Roman confirmed that nothing about Google’s existing premium music app will change “in the near future.” Keep in mind that YouTube Music is rolling out to a select number of people and is not available for everyone yet, so this weird co-existence makes some sense for now.

However, the plan is for YouTube Music to eventually replace Google Play Music sometime in 2019. When that happens, Google confirmed that the former will eventually on every key feature of the latter, including the ability to upload your own songs.

Whether YouTube Music would retain user uploads was a question left unanswered since its grand unveiling last week. Google’s T. Jay Fowler said that users’ “collection, playlists, and preferences” would be maintained, though it was unclear at the time whether that applied to saved songs and albums or uploaded songs.

Now that Google confirmed that YouTube Music will feature user uploads, Google Play Music users can breathe a bit easier. Amazon recently removed the feature from its music streaming service, so there was concern that Google would do the same with YouTube Music.

Google also said you will eventually be able to purchase songs in YouTube Music, though the songs would presumably be from Google Play.

Finally, we do not know if YouTube Music will eventually gain the ability to play on-device audio files. Android already has a rather basic built-in player, though integration with YouTube Music would allow for playlist creation and other features.

As previously stated, the plan is for YouTube Music to replace Google Play Music sometime in 2019. Google is apparently in no hurry to make that switch, so the specific date could slide around.