Microsoft had previously ventured into music services with its Zune brand. The Zune Music Marketplace included 11 million tracks. The line of Zune players and Zune music store were somewhat unsuccessful, and the brand was largely discontinued at the beginning of the 2010s, although it continued to exist on different devices and the Zune Music Pass offered unlimited access to songs for US$9.99 per month. During its E3 2012press conference, and in the wake of the upcoming release of Windows 8. Microsoft announced the relaunch of the service as Xbox Music. With the accompanying announcement of Xbox Video, this move was intended to position Xbox as the company's main entertainment brand. Both services launched October 16, 2012. On July 6, 2015, Microsoft announced the re-branding of Xbox Music as Groove to tie in with the impending release of Windows 10. The new brand utilized the Microsoft-owned "Groove" trademark formerly used for the unrelated product Microsoft Office Groove. Joe Belfiore explained that the re-branding was intended to disassociate the service from the Xbox product line, making it more inclusive to non-Xbox platforms. On October 2, 2017, Microsoft announced that it would discontinue its subscription service Groove Music Pass and music purchases on Windows Store after December 31, 2017, leaving support for playing music stored locally and on OneDrive. At this time, Microsoft began advertising the competing service Spotify, displaying a banner ad for the service within the Groove Music user interface, and offering the ability to migrate music collections and playlists to the service. As a side effect of the discontinuation, Microsoft additionally announced on May 31, 2018 that the Groove Music apps for Android and iOS would also be discontinued and cease functioning on December 1, 2018, with users being redirected to Google Play Music and iTunes Match for similar cloud synchronization functionality.
Groove Music Pass
Groove Music Pass is a discontinued pay subscription service that allowed unlimited streaming of the service's catalog on any device with the service installed. The pricing in the U.S. included monthly and annual subscriptions. A one-month trial offer was available, but those who previously tried the Zune Music Pass subscription prior to the rebranding were ineligible for this offer. An advertising-supported streaming tier was previously available, but discontinued effective December 1, 2014. Music could also be purchased directly from Windows Store. Users' purchased music, and playlists consisting of songs available on the service could be synced through OneDrive and accessed from multiple devices. Songs in a user's local library on a Windows 8.1 PC could be matched and made available to other devices if available on Groove Music Pass. Custom "radio stations" could be generated using songs related to user-selected songs. Songs could be downloaded for offline listening on smartphones. Uploading of non-Groove music became available on Windows 10. Windows 10's Anniversary Update allowed users to hide features that require a Groove Music Pass from the interface. On October 2, 2017, Microsoft announced the discontinuation of the Groove Music Pass service effective December 31, 2017. Existing subscribers were refunded, and Microsoft began promoting Spotify as an alternative by allowing saved playlists to be migrated to the service.
Cloud Collection
Groove Music let users create a collection of songs and playlists that roam through the cloud on all the supported devices. The songs could be added from the Groove Music Store or matched to songs either saved locally on the user's machine or uploaded to the user's OneDrive account for the country the user was in.
APIs for developers
The Groove Music API provided access to RESTfulweb services for developers to leverage the catalog and features of the service in their application or website.
