YouTube Music Can Now Play Music Stored Locally on Android Phones

The YouTube Music app for Android phones has now received an update that takes it one step closer to the feature set of its elder sibling, the Google Play Music app. The YouTube Music app can now play music files stored locally on Android phones. This is a feature that Google Play Music had offered to Android users. This gives YouTube Music an advantage in the battle with rivals such as Spotify, Apple Music, Amazon Music and the rest.

And this means we are one step closer to the end of Google Play Music. Speaking with News18 earlier this month, Pawan Agarwal, Head of Music Content Partnerships (India & South Asia), YouTube had confirmed that Google eventually plans to replace Google Play Music with YouTube Music, but not before certain criteria are met by the new app—the must have features included the ability to let users upload their your own music to their online library, play music locally stored on Android devices and easily transfer the library and preferences from Play Music to YouTube Music. Now, one of these features have been ticked off in the YouTube Music app.

If you have music files stored locally on your Android phone, you can access them from the Files app for instance, and select YouTube music from the ‘Open With’ menu. However, we noticed that the music you play from the local storage on Android phones is not added to the YouTube Music app. In fact, the full YouTube Music app interface doesn't open either, and there is no way to pull locally stored music into the app just yet. But considering the wheels are already in motion, those features could be arriving on YouTube Music soon.

YouTube Music is priced at Rs 99 per month in India if you just wish to subscribe to the music streaming service, or you can subscribe to the YouTube Premium package for Rs 129 per month which offers ad-free YouTube viewing, the Originals content as well as YouTube Music.