Microsoft had previously ventured into music services with its
Zune brand. The Zune 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.
[6]
During its
E3 2012 press 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 on October 16, 2012.
[7][8]
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 (now
OneDrive for Business).
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.
[9][10][11]
On October 2, 2017, Microsoft announced that its subscription service, Groove Music Pass, and music purchases on
Windows Store would be discontinued after December 31, 2017, leaving support for playing music stored locally and on OneDrive. At the same time, Microsoft began advertising the competing service
Spotify, displaying a
banner ad for the service within the Groove Music user interface,
[12] and offering the ability to migrate music collections and playlists to Spotify. As a side effect of the discontinuation, on May 31, 2018, Microsoft additionally announced 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 (the OneDrive app still offered limited music playback functions within).
[13][14]
