Google Music All Access Family Plan for G-Suite / GMail Vanity Domains

Google Music All Access Family Plan for G-Suite GMail Vanity Domains.md

Google Music All Access Family Plan for G-Suite / GMail Vanity Domains

Synopsis

I had wondered about this some weeks ago before finally trying it out today. I'm surprised nobody else had tried already. I was successful enough to be satisfied for my own uses. YMMV.

Result is I have a new Play Music account with Family Sharing which I can share with my G-Suite users, with all my playlists* moved over, and without anyone needing to maintain a separate email account.

This whole process took me about an hour, including moving across 15 playlists, but not including MX record propagation.

*Streaming available tracks only, uploaded music must be re-uploaded but I had only a handful of these anyway. I don't have music purchases but these won't transfer.

Background

I have domain.com (primary) and domain.co.uk (alias). I first tried to sign up to Google Play Music with with the alias but was unsuccessful, they are obviously wise to this one, and I honestly didn't expect it to work.

However, I had a backup plan which I was more confident about when I thought back to first setting up the GApps account and users being told they were registered under a test-google-a.com address for some services instead of domain.tld and having to resolve those conflicts.

Steps

Domain Configuration

1. Open the Domains area of your admin panel https://admin.google.com/domain.tld/AdminHome?fral=1#Domains:

2. If it's currently deactivated, enabled your domain.tld.test-google-a.com test domain alias (bottom of the page). If it looks like the below, you're all set.

3. When it says it might take up to six hours to activate, it's not lying. I left mine overnight after getting impatiently frustrated for the first hour

Play Music Registration

Sign up for a new Google account using your test domain email address. I advise doing this in an Incognito window whilst remaining logged in to your existing account, as we'll need both together later on.

https://play.google.com/music/listen

Note I registered with username@domain.tld.test-google-a.com but my confirmation email was delivered, to my regular inbox, as username%domain.tld.test-google-a.com@gtempaccount.com

The verification email for this new account will go to your regular username@domain.tld inbox. Sneaky!

Don't click the verification link in the email, instead copy it and open in the Incognito window from earlier.

Sure is nice to see that Upgrade to family plan option there.

At this stage you're basically done. As a brand new user you can take advantage of four months free, which you could also do for each of your other users and save $60 for the first four months, or you can go ahead with the family invites, using their test domain addresses. You will need to explain to each of them how to sign up with the new account.

Importing Playlists

I did this all with Chrome 56 on desktop

I first looked at Stamp after a recommendation in the ProuctForum Post, but

• It had a 50% success rate on the free trial so wasn't inspired to purchase it, so
• I looked at Play Music and realised it has built in functionality to do this between two Play Music accounts

On your existing (old) Play Music account, for each of your playlists

1. Open the playlist
2. Click Share
3. Enable Make Public if not already
4. Copy the share URL

Now in your Incognito window on your new Play Music instance, open the URL you just copied

1. Ignore the subscribe option, assuming you will be cancelling the old account for next billing cycle
2. Open the playlist menu (three dots)
3. Choose Add Playlist to Playlist
4. In the sub-menu, choose New Playlist
5. Name it the same as the old one and press Create Playlist

Repeat this process for each of your playlists. DONE!

Mobile Apps

I'm using Android N on a Nexus 6P. When I tried to login to the new account using username@domain.tld.test-google-a.com I was told that account was alredy in use on this device. However, signing in using the username%domain.tld.test-google-a.com@gtempaccount.com worked fine.

I signed in to the account on my Android phone using

• Settings > Accounts > Add Account

Once that is confirmed, I disabled sync for everything

• Settings > Accounts > Google > username%domain.etc.etc > Uncheck everything

Once logged in successfully, I returned to Play Music and using the menu (slide out/hamburger) switched to the new account which had all my playlists.

Browser Login

When I tested the new account logging in with Edge (I alredy had an Incognito instance running) I was prompted by the Your account has changed screen I mentioned in the background section.

I'm guessing the second option is the one we want to use, but for now I chose Do this later.

Conclusion

This process has worked well enough to satisfy me that I don't need to ditch G-Suite which I enjoy for many other reasons, and also don't have to maintain two separate email accounts.

No, none of your purchases are going to be available, but I only use the available streaming library so this was not a concern for me.

Note

If someone else in your family has already signed up for a Family Plan account, you could use this same test-domain technique to be added to their account without having to maintain a new inbox.

After doing the browser login, does it allow you to start using your domain.com (primary) account?

Hi... I really appreciate this post. My test domain was left active from when I setup my gSuite account and I verified that I can receive emails to it (from outside the domain).

When I tried signing up for a Google Music Play account as you suggested using username@domain.org.test-google-a.com it resulted in an error: "Couldn't find Google account."

Did they plug this hole?

A number of my family members use a G Suite domain, and it seems I won't be able to add them to my Google Play Music family account?

Any other tricks/tips?

Your guide did not work for me. However, I was able to sign up for a new Google account using my username+STRING@tld.com. It did not recognize it as a G Suite account.

Hi, I think it works (at least in my case).
But you cannot add to family group regular users which are from your G-Suite (Google for your domain...). Maybe one can add these users by test-google-a.com domain trick, but they must add this account to their phones, etc... so I will wait for "normal" way... (hope it will come).

@geekifier that did work, but it still fails to provide good integration across the board. For example, this doesn't work with Google Home and voice recognition. The user would either have to setup the Google Home to associate their voice with the G Suite account or the google account created with the modified email address.

What is the point of this? At the end of the day you are still maintaining another Google account, only this one automatically forwards all emails.

Also curious as to the point of this. Like almost everyone with a g-suite account, I also have my original gmail.com account. What advantages does the test-google-a route have over just using my gmail.com account?

To really enable the test domain email address for email reception, you also need to turn off your account as collective recipient address for the domain, in the gmail advanced settings, if this account happens to receive all the misguided incoming email for the domain. If you don't, it creates a delivery loop and the verification email will not arrive.

I applaud the inventiveness of this solution, but I think in the end you're just taking advantage of some in built email forwarding google has setup for the temp accounts. You're still managing an additional Gmail account including password, 2fa or whatever.. That being the case, you may as well signup traditionally and at least choose your own name portion of the address. I guess it saves a little amount of effort setting up a forwarder in Gmail for each new account, but still.... Maybe Google could just support family/group plans in gsuite? You know, the users are already nicely related to each other in the same domain and all... Doesn't seem a huge stretch?

Is there a technical or business reason Google does not support Family Plan sharing inside a G-Suite account? I have a really old G-Suite account that my family uses on our custom domain. I'm often surprised by Google features that I can't use because I'm on a G-Suite account. Why?

@TroyWolf,

I too am interested in this, I cannot find any mention of a technical reason, it purely seems Google just doesn't want Home users spamming their corporate service desk with support cases.

I can't see why they couldn't offer a G-Suite for Home Users Tier, they seem to be missing out on part of the market that Outlook.com premium has taken.

It seems to be possible but they don't allow it.

I have a gmail.com account that has family plan and some personal domain accounts that were in the family plan before they were converted to gsuite.

They are all still in the family plan and functional, but I am unable to add any new to the family plan since the gsuite conversion...

@pybe what I have actually ended up setting up is not using the test-domain, but creating a secondary account essentially but delivering to the same mailbox - similar to the test domain - so in my case name+music@domain.tld and had family members do the same.

Any idea how to do this hack in 2020 ?

Any idea how to do this hack in 2021 ? 😅

@rodflav
F&*^ Google and buy Spotify.
I did it after shutdown of Google Play Music.

This method should still work fine, but honestly it's not worth it. Due to Google treating G-Suite users like second class citizens in so many of their products, especially with regards to Family Sharing or integrating with Assistant, I gave up and have migrated most of my Google Services over to a regular gmail account. My email remains on my vanity G-Suite, but that's about it.

@rodflav create a new account using name+@domain.tdl

@rodflav create a new account using name+@domain.tdl

@paraizo can you develop this answer ?
Should I create a new account or just an email alias and use it as username for loging in ?
Should it be my current email address or any email address with the + added before the @ ?
Do I need to add a string after the + ?

Thx for your help !

gmail/gsuite allows you to add +something to your email address and it will just go to your email address normally (can be useful for filtering into labels and signing up to something you think might be spammy) eg: me@domain.com = me+something@domain.com

The suggestion here is that you create a new google account using me+something@domain.com which will just be a vanilla google account with no gmail to use for services such as ytmusic etc.