It doesn't get downloaded, it streams. You can download it via the app on a PC and then copy and paste it into your phone's mass memory or SD card. It is annoying, it should be downloadable via the phone.

 

Not entirely true. When you pin a song, it is loaded somewhere locally on the phone, maybe in a cache folder or something like that. The introduced this feature a while ago for those of us who find ourselves without a connection at times such as flying. Even the music you stream is cached locally for at least a song or two.

As to the OP, I can't say I've ever looked to see where exactly these items are stored so I tried having just a cursory look through the "MyFiles" app. Looks like they pared it down from the Note 2. I'm not seeing anywhere near the same amount of information in there. (Even after going into settings and checking the "show hidden files" box.)

 

When you pin a song it does get cached in your phone, until you delete the cache, however, these songs are saved as a weird file type that can only be read from the Google Music app...so if you're looking to make one of those songs your ringtone, you cant...

I would use Google Music to buy music if this wasn't the case, I still use iTunes to manage and transfer using iSyncr

 

Well, a minor victory. You can now pin to your SD card:

You can finally store your Google Play Music songs on your SD card

 

Yeah, I just buy my music on Amazon or a physical disk and rip due to Google's weird download system. I make sure to keep a copy on my laptop, two back up drives and then the copies uploaded to Google.

 

I found a way to do this before I subscribed to all access. It is a bit of a pain...
Go to a pc and access google music through that and then you are allowed to download the purchased music (I believe to two devices). Dl it to your pc then it becomes a mp3 file and will be stored where you direct it. To dl the music I think you need to click on the tab with the three buttons near the album or song...look around, you should find the option. Then transfer the file to your phone if you wish.
The purchased music you "pin" on your phone through gmusic is not accesible to other music players. So, if you use the work-around I mentioned, you can use a third party ap to play your purchased music.
However, if you did not actually "purchase" this album and are just pinning albums through the all access subscription, you will not be able to do what I suggested.
Hope this helps and is not confusing.

 

Wouldn't that be the cloud? I wouldn't know to be honest, I don't purchase too much music these days, but I figure it's their cloud servers making it possible, right?

 

For those that didn't know or haven't received an update yet:

You can finally store your Google Play Music songs on your SD card

This might actually make me use Google Music much more than I have before. One of my main reasons not using it was not having the ability to store the mp3's on the SD. Once I get the update, I'm going to figure out how to make this work.

My music player of choice is still PowerAmp, but if I'd happily use Google Music to at least temporarily store the music files of new music that I may not want to keep on my devices. The ability to store on my microSD opens up SO many things for me.

 

Its only officially supported on KitKat right now, but may still work

 

Something to look forward to in January (hopefully, if the initial talk is correct that January is the target month for us to receive Kitkat).

 

I went on a cruise a few months ago and had no service and had not pinned any songs, but there were like 100+ songs cached somewhere and I was able to listen to them w/o having data access, pretty sweet feature!