The last days of Microsoft’s Groove
It’s just around the corner. Microsoft’s Groove, formerly known as Zune and Xbox Music, is coming to a close after ten or so years.
For the uninitiated, Zune was Microsoft’s attempt to take the limelight away from Apple’s iTunes, and at launch little more than a rebadge of MSN Music. Zune never really did take off in the mainstream, but still enjoyed a small but loyal bunch of stragglers wanting something other than the clunky behemoth that is iTunes. I recall back when Zune was first announced that I went to Harvey Norman wanting to buy one, only not realising at the time it was a US exclusive. Whatever, I still enjoyed the Zune XP Theme and the occasional free songs provided by Zune. It happened to coincide with a flurry of new and exciting music blogs whom would share incredible artists, both new and old, and create a loose community of people who celebrated music.
Time went on, and Zune underwent a few facelifts, both on the device side of things and on the desktop app. Nowadays Zune itself still looks and feels like an app designed with the music listener in mind, though you can certainly tell its age by lack of full HiDPI support and design suited for displays under 1366px wide. And due it being abandoned, the content on Marketplace no longer fits properly; a sign of the times.
Zune’s UI is still beautifully animated if you can look past how it handles scrolling. Navigating to new sections has content both subtly fading and sliding into view in under a second, and playing music allows for a gorgeous glow towards the bottom of the window, which in a way breathes life into the music you’re listening to. As far as status updates are concerned to your library are concerned, the scrubber bar and album preview will sporadically be replaced with a handy update notification which isn’t distracting in the slightest, and offers a button to switch back to the scrubber — not necessary but still a very welcome addition.
As a user goes deeper into Zune, you pick up on all the small details and affection the designers and developers had into producing the product. Even in 2017, six years after the release of 4.8, Zune still maintains being one of my favourite applications. While it has no place in a touch-centric world these days, it still remains on my desktop PC. It may well be due to nostalgia, or small delights like typing anywhere to trigger a search, but it’s enjoyable.
Eventually Zune had been phased out and replaced by Xbox Music. It wasn’t bad, but it certainly wasn’t great. With a UI designed for tablets and not particularly good at that either, no window mode (Only full-screen or docked, which was a great idea, Microsoft.), and quirks involving accidentally wiping my music collection, Xbox Music didn’t have a good start. And while Microsoft’s Panorama UI was unique, it didn’t work too well on Windows Phone except as both a great way to have shortcuts, and as an unwanted step getting in the way of what users wanted: Their music.
Enough about history; go read up more about it on The Verge or whatever other tech blogs you enjoy reading. From here on I want to reminisce about the final days of Groove, share my migration to iTunes, and where to go from here.
Here’s what Groove looks like today. It’s vibrant in colour, bears crisp iconography and photography, and at least to me has navigation which mostly makes sense. A lot of what I love about Zune has found its way across, including playlists by Groove which are crazy-smart. Oh, and still gorgeously animated and stupid-fast: A mark of Microsoft’s slow migration towards their Fluent design language which I have doubts will ever be fully realised even half as well as Apple’s design language.
Compared to iTunes where the experience is night and day if you’re on MacOS or Windows, accordingly, Groove is only on Windows and it is great. I dread using iTunes on Windows, but for now is the best solution available for my needs. Sorry Spotify, but you’re gonna need to let me have more than 10,000 songs in my library if you want me as a customer. And even then, I’ve been burned enough times by services discontinued that I’m quite content to sit with a service I think will stick around for a little while longer.
Groove has been pretty spot on with artist suggestions, which is a surprise considering how obscure some of my favourite artists may be. Whether it is clever or purely a crazy-random-happenstance, I will likely never know. Still, it introduced me to 0 A M’s Nymphomaniac, and for that I’ll be forever thankful. Almost as good as Apple Music’s suggestions, even.
If there is one thing Groove has iTunes beat without even sweating, it would have to be search. There really is no comparison. If you want to search your own collection after you’ve made the request on iTunes, you’re gonna need to type your query again as there is no button to click on to search only your library. Groove’s got that covered. And results? For whatever reason Apple treats artists as songs, so if you search for Dragon (As seen in my example), you’re not going to see song titles featuring the search query, but rather it’ll be the artist. iTunes’ solution of “Songs by Artist” versus Groove’s “Songs titled…” is ok, but I feel inappropriate for search. This carries onto mobile as well.
Navigating via artist in iTunes can be done just by typing on your keyboard, but there is no visual feedback other than it jumping to what you’ve probably typed. Groove doesn’t have this capability, but does include what I refer to as “Jump Shortcuts” in the form of a single letter above each section whereupon being clicked will give you a grid of letters to choose from. Neither solution is as elegant as Zune’s, but at least Groove’s accommodates touch input. On that note, it is worth mentioning that the iOS version of both Groove and Apple Music have a pseudo scroll interaction whereby if you scroll your thumb on the right-hand side of the display, you’ll jump between different categories.
Oh, the details! I can say with certainty that I’m going to miss how Groove handles discovery. iTunes, as far as I’m aware (And I very well could be wrong. Three months in and I still cannot figure this thing out) will give you more stuff from the artist in two ways: Right-click on the artist in the middle column and click Artist Info, or go to the bottom of the song list on the right and click “See more by…”. It’s weird, and not in a good way. It becomes cumbersome and annoying having to do so much to do so little.
When compared to Groove which has “Show artist” right there, smack-bang at the top even as you navigate through your song list? Oh, it’s wonderful. And they do the same for a handful of additional functions, too. And as you get to the bottom of your song list, Groove will show additional albums by that artist. And give you the choice to view what you’ve subscribed to, or see tracks which are available but you haven’t yet added to your collection. That alone is amaaaazing. That list at the bottom, by the way? Yeah, you can add those albums to your library there and then, you can play them, heck, you can add them to a playlist or make a brand new playlist entirely without even adding the songs to your collection. You’ve got so many options presented neatly and thoughtfully. I think it’s the care to discovery which I’ll perhaps miss the most about Groove.
Microsoft finally got it right in 2017, and killed it off before the new year. Groove up to its final days was finally the ideal music player for me. Not terribly social and sharing tracks was never fun, but everything else about it was just right. I can think of a great number of reasons to explain away the absence of financial success with Groove: Microsoft fucking sucks at communicating with consumers, integration with third-party apps wasn’t a thing despite there being a decent API, and Microsoft’s failures in the consumer marketplace (Microsoft Store, we’re looking at you and the bucketloads of crapware present) has left a sour taste in the mouths of those who dare give it a shot. It’s these continual failures and lack of adoption to hit even double digits of marketshare which make me hesitant to consider Microsoft in the future. From a person whom was for Windows Phone from the first day up ’til the last, whom was crazy enough to import every model Zune to Australia, including the brown brick known as Zune 30, I’d imagine that statement has quite a bit of weight behind it.
Point is, you gotta make money to keep good things happening, and that wasn’t the case for Zune, or Xbox Music, or Groove. The experience can be wonderful, you can have an excellent web-based option to complement the service, but that’s not going to be enough to convince people to move away from what’s already “good enough”. And with the multiple subscriptions Microsoft have these days, it adds up. Office Home Premium at about 120AUD, Xbox Live Gold at 80AUD, and I don’t even know if Xbox Game Pass has a 12-month option, but I’ll assume it’s 80AUD. I can only guess because I can’t find the cost on Microsoft’s site at all. Slapping on an additional 99AUD for Groove makes entertainment terribly dear for someone in a Microsoft ecosystem wanting a standard experience covering office things, gaming, and music. And considering how confusing it is already, wait until you try offering a value proposition.
It’s a hard sell in today’s marketplace. Make it easy, charge a figure like 30AUD a month or 300AUD annually and get all the features of Office Home Premium, Xbox Live Gold & Game Pass, plus Groove?
In other words, the Office you know and love, with a world-class gaming platform with blockbuster titles available monthly, plus a massive music collection on all your devices? Sign me up!
Call it the Microsoft Pass for all I care. All I want as a consumer today is something incredibly easy and something that puts me at ease without stress. If you do that, you’re onto something remarkable. It’s the subscription platform Microsoft seems to be moving towards offering, but haven’t yet realised.
And it’s dead. Groove will be dead come the new year. I’m grateful that I may still be able to stream music from OneDrive, but who knows how long that’ll remain.
Begrudgingly I must move on. Jon Bell wrote a short essay a while back about how Apple Music just got him from the artist recommendations alone, and for most people, it works a treat. For me, it’s good enough, and while iTunes is still and likely forever will remain a steaming turd on Windows, it’s a necessary burden as I live a hybrid Microsoft and Apple consumer-slut life. I can be assured that I can upload music to iCloud and see it on my iPhone, even if the track isn’t available on iTunes itself. For lesser-known bands not available, or for recordings not available otherwise, this is great, and a feature I’m grateful available on both Apple Music and Groove. I’ll endure the terrible performance on my PC.
The migration to Apple Music from Groove was not fun; I did need to wipe my iTunes library more than once and in the end just added what I wanted to keep manually. Otherwise my collection displayed on iTunes would be a horrific mess and not something I’d want to work with. The labour was worth it, and even though the job wasn’t finished, at least I got the important stuff there before I lost it all. Pedantry at its worst, but at least I’m assured Apple Music won’t be killed off anytime in the near future, and that security is worth it. Fuck the kool-aid; I just want to be able to listen to my music wherever I find myself.
I wouldn’t have thought five years ago I’d again have anything to do with Apple, and here we are. It’s a brand new world and a new year. It’s time to let go and move on. I’ll miss the delight of Zune and Groove, everything they got so right along the way, and the things they got wrong. The insights of the Zune Insider podcast by Jessica Zahn and Matt Akers were memorable and brought about a humanity from Microsoft which wasn’t known well back then.
Thank you to everyone involved on these products over the past decade. I look back fondly of where we’ve come from, and I look forward to what’s around the corner. I’m saddened by this loss, but this is an opportunity for great things to come about.
This essay is dumb and unstructured as fuck, but good for you for making it to the bottom. Catch you in the new year.
