Just a note this Monday morning for users who’ve been with us since the ZuneSpring days and still like to carry around their Zune 120 devices full of music they downloaded from Microsoft’s Zune Music Pass. The services, officially went offline last night, meaning your music will stop working pretty soon.
Microsoft announced that Zune Music Pass and the Zune Music Store were finally being taken offline fairly recently in a post on its Ask Community. Zune Music Pass allowed users to download as many songs as they wanted for $14.99, plus get 10 free MP3s. Microsoft ran the service between 2006 and 2012, replacing it with Xbox Music soon after Windows 8 launched and the Xbox One was in its infancy. Today, the service is known as Groove Music. Very little about the service has improved. Groove Music costs $9.99 and is available on Xbox One and Windows 10.
Zune devices routinely check the service for licenses for each song that users download. With the service back-end gone, users collection will stop working over the next month until none of it is playable. Any music that you own or purchased and downloaded will continue to work. Microsoft will keep offering the Zune Software so that users can load tracks they own to their player.