Four years ago Google launched an online music service that you could use to upload as many as 20,000 songs to the cloud and stream them to your web browser, phone or tablet.

Now you can upload up to 50,000 songs to Google Play Music.

google play music

The service is free for users in supported countries, although Play Music is also home to Google’s subscription-based “All Access” streaming music service which lets you listen to millions of tunes for a monthly fee.

You can upload your music library to Google Play using the Google Music Manager app or a Chrome Web app. Once your music is online you can use the Play Music app on your mobile device or open up any supported web browser and visit play.google.com/music to start streaming your tracks (or to manage your music library or download music). You can also create instant mixes to play more songs from your library that are similar to any one track you select.

Fun fact: Google says each song you upload can be as large as 300MB. Multiple that by 50,000 and theoretically Google is offering users up to 15 TB of free storage for music (although I suspect most songs will be much, much smaller).

I’ve bee using Play Music pretty much since the service launched, and so far my music library only has about 12,000 songs… but it’s nice to know I probably won’t run out of space anytime soon.

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13 replies on “Google Play Music storage locker now holds up to 50,000 songs”

  1. I did some math and 50,000 songs, assuming mp3 lossy compression at 128 kbps,
    song length of 3 minutes each, and it worked out to around 350 GB. If you have
    a Microsoft Office 365 subscription ($70 a year individual, $100 a year up to 5 people),
    you get unlimited OneDrive storage, plus you can sync to multiple devices, and file
    away your music any way you want. if you’re going to get the Office 365 subscription
    anyway, you can just ignore the Google deal.

    1. How well would that work for streaming to mobile devices (rather than having to download locally first)?

      Google music also does matching of songs which significantly speeds up the upload time.

  2. Is there an easy way to separate your uploaded music from purchased music in Google Music?

  3. If someone has up to 50.000 songs then very likely a bunch of those are pirated. Does google screen the uploaded files with an audio fingerprint database or something like that?

    1. I started my CD collection in 87. It is easily likely that folks have 50,000 or more songs they’ve ripped from their collection.

  4. I just wish they didn’t have a device de-authorization limit of four a year. Then google music would be perfect. 🙁

  5. This is fantastic. To get around the limit, I’ve uploaded half of my music to one Google account, and half to another. Now, I should be able to unify them, as combined, they have less than 50k songs (but much more than the previous 20k limit). Thanks Google!

  6. I still don’t understand why anyone would want to upload all their music just so they can download / stream it back. If the argument is portable devices only have finite amounts of storage so “cloud” storage can augment it, fine, but most people these days have very small data caps on their mobile devices.

    1. If you have a data limit on T-Mobile this doesn’t count against you limit thanks to music freedom. Also, my laptop only has 16GB of storage unlike my desktop computer.

    2. You can select which albums/playlists to download. I download the ones I listen to most frequently, and stream the rest. It’s almost never an issue, especially given the ubiquity of wifi. If I’m on a long car ride, I just make sure I have everything I want downloaded beforehand. It’s not that different from what I had to do when I used an iPod for the same purpose.

      Google Music saved me once, when I accidentally wiped my external media drive (ouch!). I was able to re-download almost all of the 20k+ songs I lost. That alone makes Google Music worth it (and that’s it free makes it even better).

    3. If you have a lot of devices, this lets you play your music on any of them without having to load your entire music collection on each device.

      Sure, you could do the same thing in your home by storing your music on a shared drive, but this lets you listen while you’re away from home too.

      It’s also a pretty simple way to backup your collection so that you don’t lose access to your music in the event of a hard drive failure.

    4. You can upload everything and easily listen here or there or anywhere. And no worries about your hard drive dying or anything.
      It’s true data caps can limit mobile usage but most places I go regularly – home, work, friends I see a lot – I can just have wifi set up. So no biggie really.

    5. I use it to stream to various devices around the house.

      Also it’s a nice free offsite backup.

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