Bye Bye Google Play Music

This is a post I uploaded to Facebook on March 9.

In my quest to remove my personal data from google services and quit giving them my money, I’ve been searching for a service that would transfer my entire Google Music library (which is substantial) to another service. I don’t mind paying a subscription fee, just don’t want to pay it to Google, but I’ve used Music for so long that transferring my library manually would be monumental.

Over the weekend, however, I discovered Soundiiz.com, which automates the transfer of pretty much any music service to any other. They charge a monthly fee of $4.50 for the service, but I only had one transfer to conduct, and for $4.50 it’s a no-brainer (I will cancel my Soundiiz subscription before I have to pay another month).

In about 30 minutes Soundiiz managed to transfer my entire Google Music library to Spotify with ~90% success rate (not all music on GM is available on Spotify, and I had a lot of custom uploads on GM which, to my knowledge, Spotify does not support). I was blown away at how smooth the process was.

So if you need to get away from a Big Tech music service, I highly recommend checking out Soundiiz. They support pretty much every major (and many minor) music services.

The only thing Soundiiz didn’t sync was my podcasts, but I only had about a dozen or so on GM, so manually setting them up in Spotify was a cinch.

UPDATE: March 19

I am completely happy with my move to Spotify. Not only can I use it on all of my devices, I’ve noticed a few immediate benefits:

  • I can connect remotely to devices in my house that also run Spotify software, and play my music through those devices. So I can control my desktop computer with my phone, which is a huge feature that Google Play lacks.
  • Spotify’s podcast library is bigger than Google Play. Well, at least the podcasts that peak my interests.
  • If you want to listen to your own local music on Google Play, you have to upload it, and you’re limited to a certain amount of songs. (To be fair, it is a generous amount.) Spotify takes a different approach: you configure it to look for music in a directory on your device, and it will play whatever it finds there. If you have multiple devices and want your local library available on each, you will need to sync your local library with a cloud service (I recommend MegaSync).
  • Spotify’s music recommendations seem better. Google Play is decent, but Spotify seems to have more relevant recommendations.