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Microsoft Shutters Groove Music, Will Move Users To Spotify (techcrunch.com)
Microsoft announced today that it will soon shutter both its Groove Music Pass streaming service and the ability to purchase songs and albums in the Windows Store. The biggest surprise isn't that the service never took off, it's that Microsoft has partnered with Spotify to move all its Groove Music Pass customers over to Spotify. TechCrunch reports: Starting December 31, the Groove Music app will lose its features for streaming, purchasing and downloading music. Microsoft promises that moving to Spotify will be pretty seamless and that virtually all the songs and playlists that Groove users created over the years will transfer to the new service. Windows Insiders will be able to test this out with the next update, which is scheduled to roll out next week. Users will have until at least January 31, 2018 to make the move, though. For the most part, Spotify offers a superset of Groove's music catalog, so except for a few edge cases, there's no reason to believe that moving to Spotify would be a great loss for Groove Music Pass customers. And because Spotify is available on Windows Phone, too, even the few users still left on Microsoft's failed mobile platform won't miss out. As for Groove Music itself, Microsoft says the actual app won't go away anytime soon. It'll still be available for playing back and managing music that's stored locally.
To me, the bigger question about this is the fact that Groove Music is the name of the music playing application that is bundled with Windows 10, and that Microsoft resets the file associations to every time there's a feature update. They clearly couldn't get any traction. Samsung tried to get a music service off the ground with their "Milk" service, which got discontinued last year. Apple still keeps the money flowing with iTunes, but they couldn't get Ping to take off. HTC had their contract with Beats, and that gained only a smidge of traction before Apple bought the brand.
So, after everyone tried to launch an alternative to Pandora, Spotify, Amazon, iTunes, and technically Youtube...is it safe to say that the days of software taking off solely based on being bundled with hardware are over? I mean, I'm really hard pressed to come up with an application that "bundled its way to success" in the past decade, desktop or mobile.
Is it safe to say that the days of market dominance via bundle are over, and by extension we can stop having software installed with hardware by default (especially the uninstallable kind)? Because I'm really sick of having to drop to Powershell to remove all of the unnecessary Windows 10 apps, or root my phone to get rid of all the thoroughly unnecessary Samsung software.
I was just about to buy a zune and squirt some music to a friends zune and get it up in groove using TruePlay (tm) ... they pull the plug....
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
Face it Microsoft, you absolutely suck at these "me too" offerings you keep doing.
Microsoft really should stick to their core competencies instead of endlessly trying to rip off other people's products.
Nobody wants these things from you, because you're terrible at them.
Microsoft was actually pretty early to the subscription music market with Zune Music Pass (which eventually morphed into Groove music), before most of the current major players had offering. But, it started out attached to the Zune so... yea.
I browse on +1 so AC's need not respond, I won't see it.
Well this sucks. I just abandoned Google Play for Groove, because I wanted a service with music streaming and support for storing my own music in the cloud. Pretty sure Google Play and Groove were my only options for this, and I don't want to go back to Google. (Amazon might do this, but pretty sure their music service is US-only.) At least we are past the point where you would buy DRM music and lose it when the store shut down...
So what happens to all the songs people have already purchased through the service? Spotify is a streaming service, so obviously people will no longer have the ability to download those tracks they "bought". What's more, it's a subscription streaming service, so once their subscription expires they will lose the ability to stream those songs they supposedly "bought" before. Were they sold in a non-DRM encumbered format so they can keep playing their previous purchases they already downloaded?
their shitty groove music service, hopefully these will be updated. Microsoft should do one better and offer integration into Google music and Amazon music...
They're learning that it is impossible to be all things to all people. It is better to have a few core products and excel at them (No pun intended) rather than try to be a jack of all trades and shitty at most.
Another formerly uninstallable Win10 app that I will be able to ditch!
Don't worry groovers, it will "Play for sure!"
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Zune Music Pass turned into "Xbox Music" when THEN turned into "Groove".
So what you are saying is that it eventually morphed into Groove music. Thanks for clearing that up AC.
I browse on +1 so AC's need not respond, I won't see it.
Microsoft really should stick to their core competencies instead of endlessly trying to rip off other people's products.
Umm, that is their core competency.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
In other news, Groove Music gets more public exposure because it's closing than it ever did when it was supposedly trying to gain some eyeballs.
Microsoft: You do some things very well, but pretty much everything else you do terribly badly. Maybe stick with the things you do well, yeah?
Recall Silverlight that flaming piece of shit media player. They dropped that like a hot potato too. And Groove - I've got a Windows 10 box and I don't use Groove at all. Instead it's an Amazon music player and they are lease haven't dropped the ball yet.