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We just got word that YouTube Music was going to finally bring the ability to listen to podcasts. This seems in line with the company’s ongoing push into the podcast market. However, Google announced that YouTube Music Podcasts and Google Podcasts will not merge.
Since 2021, YouTube has been working on becoming a podcasting platform. The company brought in Kai Chuck to head the podcasting venture, but it took a while before we could see anything come to light. Last year, YouTube unveiled a podcasts page that showed you recommended podcasts based on what’s popular and your watch history.
Recently, we just got the news that YouTube was going to bring podcasts to YouTube Music. That’s not altogether unexpected, but it was definitely a long time coming. YouTube Music was the replacement for Google Play Music (which offered podcasts), but it didn’t bring over its ability to play podcasts. Instead, people could listen to their favorite podcasts using the Google Podcasts app released back in 2018.
Google Podcasts and YouTube Podcasts will not merge
One thing about Google is that it has a tendency to have redundant services running at the same time. It eventually merges them, and this is what we expected the company to do this time around. Since Google owns YouTube, we suspected a transition period. However, according to 9To5Google, Google announced that it’s not going to merge Google Podcasts and YouTube Podcasts.
This could be a good idea, as the transition between Google Play Music and YouTube Music was rough for some people. While YouTube Music has grown in the last couple of years, there are a bunch of people who still miss Google Play Music. The platform has some features that YouTube Music didn’t adopt.
So, moving podcast services might create the same sort of issues. While Google does own YouTube, YouTube is still its own company, and it’s going to do things differently than Google. So, keeping them separate is a good idea.