MS Kills off Groove Music - A great idea - poorly executed
On Oct 2, MS announced that it will kill off the Groove Music Service and Music Pass on Dec 31, 2017 and had partnered with Spotify to allow users to transition their playlists to the cloud based streaming service.
An updated version of the Groove Music app is scheduled to be released on Oct 9 that will provide a wizard to migrate your music to Spotify. The Groove Music app will still exist but will only support playing music from your local or OneDrive libraries.
Any existing Groove Music Pass subscriptions will be refunded pro-rated to Dec 31 and at that point all streaming services will stop.
This announced effectively kills off MS's multiple and me too attempts to provide an alternative to Apple's iTunes.
Starting all the way back in 2004 - MS entered the Music Store business with MSN Music that introduced us to the .wma file format and the alowed PC users to play music with the then somewhat new Windows Media Player app.
But MSN Music pretty much flopped and so MS pivoted in 2006 we were introduced to Zune - a combination of a iPod competitor device and the Zune Marketplace app.
This is where the great idea came. Instead of iTune's buy only model - MS allowed users to subscribe to the Zune service for a monthly or annual fee and have access to their entire library. In the early days you could download and keep up to 10 albums per month. That concept of a subscription really made sense to me - so I bought my first Zune Music Pass.
To me this was a brilliant concept. As long as you maintained your subscription you could stream anything you wanted. It was very cost effective gave you all the flexibility of listening to anything your heart felt like.
While I never owned one - the Zune players themselves were also considered pretty good. At one point they were really more advanced than anything Apple was putting out. But they didn't sell well - never ranking in the top 5 player devices.
But by then the iPhone was introduced and the world changed. And as smart as the Zune subscription model was - MS really didn't market it well and also had challenges keeping up with Apple in terms getting the latest music. It would often be months after new music showed up on iTunes and Apple was also signing exclusive deals so some music would never show up in Zune.
Additionally MS Digital Right Mgmt (DRM) services really kind of sucked. Often you would run into issues where you suddenly could not play music, especially if you had been offline for a while. You also had to make sure you got on-line - launched the app to refresh the DRM timestamps.
But Zune hung around for several years and went through several releases until 2011 when MS killed it off. The Zune Marketplace app hung around through 2012.
But as MS prepared the world for Windows 8 - they pivoted again and replaced Zune with the xBox Music App. The results were horrible - the XBox app was extremely buggy often failed to handle basic capabilities like updating libraries correctly - supporting the correct album art and again the whole DRM thing was a mess.
All though out the Windows 8 - 8.1 timeframe XBox Music struggled. With Windows 10 - we saw the App transition again to Groove. the good news was the app actually worked and MS had maintained the subscription model through all the various iterations and DRM actually worked ok.....on your PC.
But Mobile was another issue. While MS did introduce Groove apps for Windows Mobile, iOS and Android - it was often plagued with DRM issues and syncing issues... it was very frustrating be be on a flight - open the music app and not be able to play music in your collection.
So now MS has thrown in the towel and it punting it's users to Spotify. So while I like the fact that Spotify supports plans like a family plan that MS never embraced has a much larger collection of music as well as good apps for Windows 10, Android and iOS - this is not good news for the MS Store.
I'm waiting now for the next shoe to drop which is MS also getting out of the Movies & TV business and transitioning users to a service like Hulu. While they are at it - they might as well get out of the books business as well since they are also me too player to Amazon and Apple.
Bottom line is while MS had a brilliant idea with the subscription music model - their constant re-branding, re-lauching and poor execution made the services unattractive to many users. Also with their failure in Mobile - I expect that within a year the MS Store will be an apps only market with a portfolio that will slowly dwindle as more and more ISVs slowly allow their apps to drop.
An updated version of the Groove Music app is scheduled to be released on Oct 9 that will provide a wizard to migrate your music to Spotify. The Groove Music app will still exist but will only support playing music from your local or OneDrive libraries.
Any existing Groove Music Pass subscriptions will be refunded pro-rated to Dec 31 and at that point all streaming services will stop.
This announced effectively kills off MS's multiple and me too attempts to provide an alternative to Apple's iTunes.
Starting all the way back in 2004 - MS entered the Music Store business with MSN Music that introduced us to the .wma file format and the alowed PC users to play music with the then somewhat new Windows Media Player app.
But MSN Music pretty much flopped and so MS pivoted in 2006 we were introduced to Zune - a combination of a iPod competitor device and the Zune Marketplace app.
This is where the great idea came. Instead of iTune's buy only model - MS allowed users to subscribe to the Zune service for a monthly or annual fee and have access to their entire library. In the early days you could download and keep up to 10 albums per month. That concept of a subscription really made sense to me - so I bought my first Zune Music Pass.
To me this was a brilliant concept. As long as you maintained your subscription you could stream anything you wanted. It was very cost effective gave you all the flexibility of listening to anything your heart felt like.
While I never owned one - the Zune players themselves were also considered pretty good. At one point they were really more advanced than anything Apple was putting out. But they didn't sell well - never ranking in the top 5 player devices.
But by then the iPhone was introduced and the world changed. And as smart as the Zune subscription model was - MS really didn't market it well and also had challenges keeping up with Apple in terms getting the latest music. It would often be months after new music showed up on iTunes and Apple was also signing exclusive deals so some music would never show up in Zune.
Additionally MS Digital Right Mgmt (DRM) services really kind of sucked. Often you would run into issues where you suddenly could not play music, especially if you had been offline for a while. You also had to make sure you got on-line - launched the app to refresh the DRM timestamps.
But Zune hung around for several years and went through several releases until 2011 when MS killed it off. The Zune Marketplace app hung around through 2012.
But as MS prepared the world for Windows 8 - they pivoted again and replaced Zune with the xBox Music App. The results were horrible - the XBox app was extremely buggy often failed to handle basic capabilities like updating libraries correctly - supporting the correct album art and again the whole DRM thing was a mess.
All though out the Windows 8 - 8.1 timeframe XBox Music struggled. With Windows 10 - we saw the App transition again to Groove. the good news was the app actually worked and MS had maintained the subscription model through all the various iterations and DRM actually worked ok.....on your PC.
But Mobile was another issue. While MS did introduce Groove apps for Windows Mobile, iOS and Android - it was often plagued with DRM issues and syncing issues... it was very frustrating be be on a flight - open the music app and not be able to play music in your collection.
So now MS has thrown in the towel and it punting it's users to Spotify. So while I like the fact that Spotify supports plans like a family plan that MS never embraced has a much larger collection of music as well as good apps for Windows 10, Android and iOS - this is not good news for the MS Store.
I'm waiting now for the next shoe to drop which is MS also getting out of the Movies & TV business and transitioning users to a service like Hulu. While they are at it - they might as well get out of the books business as well since they are also me too player to Amazon and Apple.
Bottom line is while MS had a brilliant idea with the subscription music model - their constant re-branding, re-lauching and poor execution made the services unattractive to many users. Also with their failure in Mobile - I expect that within a year the MS Store will be an apps only market with a portfolio that will slowly dwindle as more and more ISVs slowly allow their apps to drop.
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