Besides its own music catalog, YouTube Music also allows you to upload up to 100,000 songs to your YouTube Music library. Once your music is uploaded, you can use YouTube Music to play it as part of your listening experience and access it on other devices.
In this article, we will show you how to upload local music to YouTube Music, as well as how to download YouTube Music as local files.
Uploading a personal music collection to your YouTube Music library is not exclusive to YouTube Music Premium subscribers. YouTube Music allows all users, Free and Premium, to upload their personal music collections and access them on another device.
For these uploaded tracks, Free users enjoy benefits including background playback, ad-free listening, and offline listening without YouTube Music Premium.
However, YouTube Music Premium members have additional benefits, such as ad-free listening, background playback and offline playback of the streaming music library. How to get YouTube Premium for free?
YouTube Music allows you to upload songs in FLAC, M4A, MP3, OGG, and WMA formats. To upload your personal music collection to your YouTube Music library, you will need to use the YouTube Music web player. The YouTube Music mobile app can only access music uploaded from a computer and play local music, but doesn’t support uploading local music.
1. Go to music.youtube.com in your browser, log in to your YouTube Music account. Drag your songs to any surface or click your profile icon and choose Upload music.
2. You will see a progress bar indicating your music is uploading.
3. After uploading is finished, you get a confirmation message. Click GO TO LIBRARY.
4. Uploaded songs will be shown under Library > Uploads. Your uploaded music may take some time to show up in your library, even after it has been successfully uploaded.
To see your uploads in the YouTube Music app, you must be using the YouTube Music mobile app version 3.51 or newer. Tap Library at the bottom and choose Uploads.
To search for music you’ve uploaded, click or tap “Uploads” after searching to view uploaded search results.
Several other music services also support uploading a personal music collection alongside their streaming catalogs. Here are a few notable examples:
Apple Music:
Apple Music allows users to upload their personal music files to their iCloud Music Library. You can access uploaded music on other devices with an active Apple Music subscription. If you don’t subscribe to Apple Music, the “iTunes Match” service allows you to access them across your Apple devices and Windows PCs.
Amazon Music:
Amazon Music desktop app offers a feature called “Automatically Import Music From” allowing users to upload their personal music collections to the platform.
However, you cannot access uploaded music on another device. As an alternative, you can follow this guide to upload your local music to YouTube Music and enjoy it across devices.
Spotify:
Spotify offers the option to add local files from your computer or mobile devices to your Spotify library. This means you can add music files stored on your device to your Spotify playlists and listen to them in the Spotify app. This feature allows you to have a unified music library within Spotify, combining both the streaming catalog and your personal music files.
It’s important to note that for Free users, Spotify’s ability to play local files is limited to the devices where the files are stored. To sync these local files across different devices, you’ll need a Premium subscription.
Related: How to transfer Spotify music to YouTube Music
If you want to download YouTube Music songs, albums, and playlists to your computer for offline playback, all you need is Pazu YouTube Music Converter. This smart tool can download YouTube Music to MP3, M4A, AAC, FLAC, WAV, and AIFF on Mac and Windows with one click. Then you can listen to them offline on any supported device. You can also follow this guide to upload the local files to YouTube Music from your computer and listen to them offline on your mobile devices.
To get started, download, install and run Pazu YouTube Music Converter on your Mac or Windows PC.
If you have already purchased a license, click the key icon to register the converter. If not, continue using the trial version.
The converter features a built-in YouTube Music web player. You don’t need to sign in to your YouTube Music account.
The default output format is M4A. Pazu YouTube Music Converter also supports MP3, AAC, FLAC, WAV and AIFF. Click the gear icon to change the output format, output folder, bitrate, and sample rate according to your needs.
Browse or search to find the songs, albums or playlists you want to download. Click the album or playlist you want to download. Then click the red icon to load songs.
All songs in the playlist/album will be selected by default. You can uncheck the songs you don’t want to get.
After selecting the songs, click Convert button to start downloading YouTube Music songs to the format you choose. You will see a progress circle indicating your music is downloading.
Once the songs have been downloaded, click the folder icon to quickly locate the DRM-free YouTube Music songs in the format you choose. You can then transfer and play it anywhere.
To view or manage all music you’ve downloaded, click the clock icon in the top right corner of the YouTube Music Converter interface. You can also upload downloaded YouTube Music songs to Spotify, Amazon Music, Apple Music etc.
Download and convert YouTube Music to MP3, M4A, etc