Microsoft Rips Groove From Heart

Microsoft has this week wound down its Groove Music streaming service and announced a partnership with Spotify.

The company’s ‘Xbox Music’ was rebranded as Groove Music in 2015, but the company has now announced plans to discontinue Groove Music passes from the end of this year- the service and related app will be completely knocked on the head, with subscribers refunded pro-rata. The move was detailed in a Microsoft blog post. 

The partnership will enable Groove Music subscribers to migrate playlists to Spotify, which by sheer coincidence became available on Microsoft’s Xbox one games console in August this year.

Microsoft is remaining tight lipped about how many people were actually subscribed to Groove, but it was clearly in the shadow of Spotify’s 60m subscribers. Numerous alternatives are available to Microsoft Windows users, who can also stream through Pandora and Deezer alongside Spotify, with Apple Music soon to be introduced.

As a footnote, it is worth mentioning that Microsoft launched Zune Music Pass, a subscription service that gave Zune owners unlimited music downloads every month, back in 2006 when Spotify was a mere glimmer in Daniel Ek’s eye. Lets also not forget that Steve Jobs said this to Rolling Stone in 2003 : “The subscription model of buying music is bankrupt. I think you could make available the Second Coming in a subscription model and it might not be successful.”