Google’s Play Music app reportedly has a bug that apparently deletes your downloaded and cached music stored on the microSD card whenever your device gets reboot.
Some users who have Play Music’s cache and storage settings enabled for an external SD card experienced the problem, reports Android Police.
The issue was reported to Google Play support and the first reply from Google’s representative defended the bug saying that it is due to copyright concerns. But later Google apologized for the first information and acknowledged that it is a bug which has been worked upon. Checkout Google’s lengthy reply below.
So till the time Google is working on a fix, you can tweak the Play Music cache and storage settings to internal storage and your music will remain intact.
I want to first apologize for the information we provided to you about the issue with subscription tracks being deleted from the SD card. After reviewing your case details, it looks like the previous agent you spoke with misunderstood the issue that you’re reporting. We have taken immediate actions to address this which should prevent a situation like this from happening in the future. Again, I deeply apologize for not accurately understanding the issue you were experiencing and for not providing you with the correct information on the issue.
I’d like to first explain how music is stored for offline listening. Music files that are downloaded to a device (phone or tablet) are only downloading a cached version of song’s file, not the actual .mp3 file. This is done to help minimize the amount of space that the downloaded music takes up. This is also implemented to curb abuse of the subscription service as the download music is only accessible through the Google Play Music app for that device and account. This means that a user wouldn’t be able to download music to an SD card and then take that SD card and use it on a different device as the music is chased to that device and account.
With that said, music that has been downloaded for offline listening, either to the internal storage or SD card, should never be deleted without the user initiating the deletion. This is an actual known issue with this service. The good news is that we are aware of this issue and are actively working to get it fixed. Thanks for your effort in submitting those logs earlier, which helped make us aware of this issue.