YouTube Music might let you upload your local music soon

Google is reportedly adding a locker function to YouTube Music that will allow users to upload their offline libraries to the service. The feature is already present in Google’s other music streaming service, Play Music, and is believed to be one reason that service hasn’t yet been shuttered.

YouTube Music has continued to add improvements — Including a recently-added section that promotes new song and album releases, but users of Play Music have consistently complained about the omission of any song upload functionality. Some people have old libraries of music they’ve bought over the years or ripped from CDs that they’d like to be able to access in their music app.

Sources speaking to 9to5Google say that internal testing of the new locker is underway, with a public launch coming, “sooner rather than later.” Google will apparently begin the transition process to YouTube Music by asking Play Music users to import their collections once the feature is live, sometime in the next few months.

YouTube Music is Google's new music strategy — Google has long said that it would move users of its legacy Play Music service over to YouTube Music, it’s just never been clear what the timeline on that would be. Earlier this week it was announced that YouTube Music and YouTube Premium have a combined 20 million subscribers. Google has chosen to piggyback off the massive size of YouTube in order to market its music service — smart considering that YouTube is still one of the biggest places people go to listen to music. YouTube Premium costs $12 per month and bundles both YouTube Music and an ad-free YouTube experience. That's a solid deal, but YouTube Music is still considered to be a minor player in music streaming, with an estimated 5 percent share of the space.

Google revealed earlier this week that YouTube is one of its biggest growth engines. The video streaming site took in $15 billion in revenue in 2019, up from $11 billion in 2018. That number doesn’t include subscriptions from YouTube Music or Premium, however.