Microsoft Shutters Groove Music, Will Move Users To Spotify (techcrunch.com) 51
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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
Is Bundling even effective anymore? (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
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Milk was just skinned slacker radio, with radio only feature. I was a heavy slacker user but switched to Spotify when I could use spotibot, but now spotibot seems to no longer work. Slacker had offline radio which was great for the commute, so I could cache music. Spotify lets me do this with playlists, so thats comparable.
Pandora and Slackrr didn't have a music catalog back then, just related music, which is good for discovery of related types of music, but very limiting on new artist browsing. Spotify
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and by extension we can stop having software installed with hardware by default (especially the uninstallable kind)?
No and Yes. I think it's a horrible practice to deliver an empty useless device.
But equally horrible is not being able to remove something you don't want.
Oh! Just when I was fixing to ... (Score:5, Funny)
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I think you mean "PlaysForSure"
Unfortunate... (Score:1)
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Why, because you like to pay to continuously download what you already have downloaded?
Sorry, I'll rip my music and move around the MP3 files as I see fit. I'm sure as hell not paying someone for the privilege of streaming my own music, nor do I give a damn to require an internet connection for something which can be stored locally. How do you listen to your music on a
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Google Music allows you to store 50,000 songs without paying though, this is larger than most people's mp3 libraries.
Does that include the songs that you want? An unlimited number of songs that you do not care about is no use if you still have to pay for the songs you really want.
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You can't own on Spotify, though. (Score:2)
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 stream
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And now it's become clear why it's pointless to purchase digital songs or pay for streaming. They can cut you off anytime.
CDs are so cheap now, just buy it rip it and toss the damn thing in the trash.
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Microsoft has released games that tie into... (Score:1)
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 (Score:2)
Nice! (Score:1)
Plays for sure! (Score:3)
In other news... (Score:2)
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?
Typical of Microsoft (Score:2)