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I am thinking about getting a subscription to google music after seeing so many good reviews (plus, the same subscription will allow you access to Youtube Red when it comes out! source).
I just have this doubt: if I can't renew my subscription one month, will I be able to hear those albums that I made available for offline listening? How does that work?
Thanks
Google music doesn't store the songs you save offline like if they were normal downloads, instead it saves them
in a randomized folder structure with obfuscated file names.
So you can't just browse them with a file manager and have access to them; they are in a cache of sort. When the subscription expires, Play music provides to delete them from your phone. If you think about it, this would make the subscription system useless, resulting in a financial loss for Google. You can try, though, this app (root required) which is able to locate the files and "decrypt" them, to make them available as simple stored files. Note also that the app currently doesn't work on Marshmellow. For more information and a guide on how to use Play music exporter check this article.
As far as I know, Google Play Music (the app) stores offline music in it's data directory. This is device dependent, and you'll need a file explorer such as ES File Explorer to access the files directly. If you have the music stored on the device itself (so not a microSD card or external storage), they'll be located in somewhere such as /storage/emulated/0/Android/data/com.google.android.music/files/music or /storage/sdcard0/Android/data/com.google.android.music/files/music - they are all MP3 files, and the filenames are all numbers, eg: 245.mp3 or 14.mp3. If they are stored on external storage, again it is system dependent, but one possible location is /storage/sdcard1/Android/data/com.google.android.music/files/music.
Anyway, I'm not sure if these files get deleted when your subscription ends/you cancel it, you you could always copy them to somewhere else (for example, /storage/sdcard0/Music or /storage/emulated/0/Music for internal storage, or /storage/sdcard1/Music for external storage.
