Althoughdedicated podcast listeners— such as myself — may appreciate keeping their library of shows separated from their music collection, it seems like the vast majority of casual listeners appreciate everything being thrown into a single app. That’s the message Google sent, anyway, when it announcedGoogle Podcasts was on the chopping block for 2024, with YouTube Music becoming its “centralized podcasting destination” (sigh). Now we know exactly when that transition is happening, and it’s sooner than you might think.
Google announced todaythat users can continue listening to their favorite shows through Podcasts through March of 2024, with its closure coming as early as April of next year (via9to5Google). The company is attempting to make a transfer to YouTube Music’s podcasting tools as easy as possible through an “Export subscriptions” banner coming to the top of the Podcasts app and within the settings of the web tool. The support page claims it’ll take a few minutes for the transfer to finish, but you’ll be alerted within YouTube Music when the process is finished.
You will be able to use Google Podcasts through March 2024. If you wish to save your Google Podcast subscriptions, use one of the methods below through July 2024.
Obviously, we’ve known this was coming since September, and thewriting was seemingly on the wall well before that. Google, in response to its own actions, continues to build out its feature set within YouTube Music with some tools that, frankly, seem pretty basic to the ability to manage large collections of shows. In addition toRSS support for podcaststhat we’ve seen start to roll out to a select group of users, listeners will also gain the ability to mark episodes as played within the coming months. As someone who hasn’t tried out podcasts in YouTube Music, I frankly can’t believe that’s a feature that is both missingandwill take months to implement, but hey, it wouldn’t be an apptransition without some frustration.
For those of us who want music and podcasts to live in separate corners of our smartphones — or, you know, don’t want to wait months for theability to mark podcasts as played— you’ll be able to grab an OPML file of your collection to share with the app of your choosing until July of next year. Both this and the YouTube Music export tool are for US-only users at launch, though; the company is promising more details for international users soon. Personally, I’m a die-hard Pocket Casts fan; I can mark episodes as played all day.
It’s been a relatively quiet year forGoogle killing beloved services—outside of Stadiaand the unexpecteddeath of Google Domains, most of the 2023 graveyard is made up of smaller, more niche platforms. With Podcasts' death now dated, though, we’re looking at a potentially busy year for Google’s grim reaper. Place your bets now for what will die in the future; my money’s on Fi, for no real reason outside of how much Google loves unexpectedly killing beloved services. We’re due for a big one, after all.
