Microsoft Groove Music

» see music.microsoft.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

in 2012 i was on spotify in turkey, which had launched in september that year. groove music was the icon pinned to the windows start menu that i never opened. the brand naming was already its third generation by then, after zune marketplace and zune music pass, and after the xbox music rename that lasted three years before microsoft tried groove. honestly, by the time groove showed up on the windows 10 lock screen as a default tile, the only people opening it were the people who had been opening xbox music yesterday, plus a handful of nokia lumia owners running the same app on windows phone 8.

xbox music launched on october 16 2012 alongside windows 8, with the same business model the zune music pass had been running since 2006. nine dollars and ninety nine cents per month for unlimited streaming, with playback on windows, on xbox, and on the windows phone of the moment. apple had been running itunes match since 2011 but had not launched apple music yet, spotify had launched in the us in 2011 and was building out europe, google had announced google play music all access in may '13. either way, the entire industry was converging on the same monthly subscription model and microsoft was one of the four major contenders at the start.

the rename to groove happened on july 29 2015 with the launch of windows 10. microsoft moved the brand to a name nobody was suing them over (the previous xbox music name had an unrelated groove networks lineage from a ray ozzie company), updated the icon to a green-pink gradient, and shipped an ios and android app for the first time. that part was the right product move two years too late. by then apple music had launched on june 30 2015, spotify had crossed 75 million users globally, and google play music all access was the bundled offer with every google play purchase. honestly, groove was the icon you saw on the windows lock screen without ever opening it.

the shutdown announcement landed on october 2 2017. anyway, microsoft told subscribers the streaming service and the windows store music purchases would end on december 31 2017 and offered a migration path to spotify with playlists and library data carried over via a built-in tool. the ios and android apps continued to play locally stored files for almost another year, until december 1 2018, when they stopped working entirely. the windows 10 desktop app was rebranded back to groove music but as a local playback app only, then quietly replaced by the new media player in windows 11 in early 2022 and in windows 10 in early '23.

~ the chronicle ~

~ what it was ~

the underlying catalog and the backend were inherited from zune, which means microsoft had been running a paid music streaming service since 2006, longer than spotify had been a company. the rebrand chain across zune marketplace and zune music pass and xbox music plus groove music was four different names on the same business in eleven years. each rename came with a new logo and a new app and the same library underneath.

back then. the music pass tier let you stream anything in the catalog plus keep ten free tracks per month with old zune-era credits, a feature microsoft killed during the xbox music transition in 2014. honestly, that was the last time the consumer side of the brand had a hook nobody else offered. after 2014 it was just another nine-ninety-nine subscription with a smaller catalog.

~ the decline ~

the windows phone install base was the bedrock microsoft needed to keep groove on every consumer screen, and the windows phone install base collapsed during the same window. by '16 windows phone was under 1% global smartphone share and lumia was in maintenance. the spotify and apple music apps shipped on android and ios by default. the groove app on those same platforms was the third or fourth music app most users had installed, behind whatever was preloaded on the device.

microsoft kept the b2b angle around for an additional year, with the groove music business product running through office 365 enterprise plans. anyway, the consumer streaming service died first on december 31 2017, the enterprise version died quietly the next year. the same teams stayed inside microsoft and a chunk of them moved to teams development by 2019.

~ the long tail ~

the spotify partnership announced alongside the shutdown was the cleanest exit microsoft has ever taken from a consumer media service. groove music subscribers could click a button inside the groove app and have all their playlists imported into spotify automatically. the migration tool ran for ninety days after the shutdown and then went offline. honestly, the spotify deal also gave microsoft a path off owning the service while still pointing windows users at a partner.

the brand itself bounced around for a few more years as a local-playback app, then got replaced by the media player rewrite in 2022. as of 2026 nothing inside windows uses the groove name. the zune brand had died in 2012, the xbox music brand in 2015, the groove brand in 2017, and the local app in 2022. for some reason, the same five-engineer subscription product had four funerals.

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