Zune Marketplace, RIP

I am so upset, I was also forced to restart my Zune software, and the marketplace is gone. Literally the worst day of my entire life.

Sorry to see them totally disable the Marketplace even when I couldn't stream or rent music right from the Zune software anymore I had access to a great database tool for knowing what was going on in the world of music; other than the big name and promoted releases.

You can't even really get that from the Groove ap that is all in Store which is just a jumbled mess of algorithms that is showing you what is popular with I assume buyers and pass listeners that came out recently. You dig in to the new music area of your respected genre on the Zune software it was listed in the order of added to the Marketplace no algorithms putting them in a funky order burying stuff that is new, something you never heard of, and possibly interesting.  Great tool to actually discover new music without going through bandcamp after bandcamp or whatever pages.

Also lose the ease of seeing what is in my collection that  is in the Marketplace because lets face it Groove ap doesn't pick up every little thing in my collection. So when figuring out what I need for a long drive on my phone don't have the ease of one button check to see if such and such album I will be able to stream. Haven't found an easy one click to see if an album is streamable that is also in my personal collection without typing in a search. With the heavy graphical use you can't even scroll through your collection easily it takes time, to much time, to catch up which is a problem when dealing with 2000 plus artists, 4000 plus albums, and 48,000 plus songs.

Basically the Groove ap is all frustrating and more of an easy purchase tool rather than a listen tool. Great tool if you are starting from scratch not someone collecting music for 30 plus years.

Noticed the properties of rented music all say Unknown now so guess will have to wait for them to die. Though I do wonder what is going to happen to the early days stuff I bought that still had some kind of DRM protection when everything wasn't DRM free if I have to buy a load of Black Flag albums again I am going to be mad.

Also notice the player screen saver doesn't go to artist centric slide shows anymore. The switching out of album art will still catch peoples eye walking by but not as much as the artist slide shows.

I get it programs and software always move on and not cost effective to support older software but being one of those that has been around awhile nothing has been improved by making things prettier and imitating the competition. 

It's been real and it's been fun. *pour a 40 on the ground for my dead Zune Marketplace homie*

So far, the Zune Pass downloads are still working. The only change I've noticed is that they will no longer sync to your Zune device. They still play through the software. So the only question at this point is how long that will last. My guess - it's really just that - is that they will continue to be good for about another month. I'm basing that on the fact that until this all happened, the right click on any giving file would list a date one month into the future as the expiration date of sorts. Now we just have "Unknown," but it's possible that we're just getting that because there's no longer a Zune Marketplace for the software to connect with to verify that date. So it's probably going to countdown 30 days starting from last night. Again, that's just a guess. We'll see. You could argue that as long as we have a Groove Pass, they should be good indefinitely, since we're just listening to the same content in a different platform. But I don't have any confidence that Microsoft sees it that way.

I think you head the nail on the head with this idea of exploring new music with the Zune Marketplace. That's largely what I used it for. I had the Zune Pass, with its 10 free monthly credits, and a subscription to eMusic. If there was something that I heard about, or thought I might be interested in, I could always just download it from the Zune Marketplace, and let it sit with me for a few weeks before deciding whether to redeem my Zune credits or eMusic credit. (For good or for ill, eMusic is back to carrying only indie labels now. Most of what I listen to is indie, so that's generally not a problem, but when I wanted something on a major label, I'd save that for the Zune credits.) All in all, a great system, which allowed me to discover a ton of new music and buy with a lot more confidence. I remember the bad old days when you might hear a song you liked on the radio, shell out $15 for a full CD, only to discover that the song was unrepresentative and the album mediocre as a whole. This was so much better.

And just like that episode of South Park, "And... it's gone."

I agree that Groove is kind of messy. I've not played around with Pandora or other streaming services to have a good enough sense as to whether it's superior or inferior. It generally seemed on par, on the whole. But as you suggested, it may not be aimed at music lovers like you and me. Like you, I have a massive music collection. Not quite 30 years worth of collecting, but close. I think my first CD was purchased in 1993 (Pearl Jam's "Vs."), so although there might be cassettes in some long forgotten box hiding somewhere, I'll just peg that as the beginning of my collection, since that the first music that I still have in its original form and is easily convertible to a digital format. I'm looking at my Zune software's library right now, and I see that I have 2249 artists listed, 6998 albums, and 37,358 songs. Some of that is Zune Pass content, but I'd estimate that 90-95% are mp3's I own free and clear. With the recent announcement that the OneDrive will now only come with 5 GB for free, how on earth is Groove supposed to work for someone like me? Particularly considering that a lot of this is out-of-print and rare music that can't be found on any digital provider, whether Groove or anyone else?

I don't mean to bash Groove here. It does have some nifty features here and there. The one I liked the most was having a customized radio station of sorts generated for music related to any given artist. I did manage to discover a few new artists here and there that way. So that's cool. But at the end of the day, for someone like me, the Zune platform made the most sense. Music stored locally, so I'm not having to pay some crazy amount of money for a cell phone dataplan (or drain its battery), or be limited to working only where I can get a good wifi signal. The shuffle function, so I can just let my player or the software go for hours without any hiccups. Or, where I can just randomly throw in a full album or song into the already playing shuffle when it strikes me that I'd like to hear something specific.

My guess is, for the moment, I will probably play around a bit more with Groove to see I can make it into something more useful. But more than likely, I'll simply end my subscription on May 14th, when it's set to renew. I'll look into other streaming services and their ability to take uploaded content. If Pandora or someone like that can take something more like 100 GB or more of uploads, for the same price, it might be worth it just as a form of cloud-based backup. I think that's unlikely so instead, I'll probably just take the monthly subscription fee I would have spent on Zune Marketplace and increase my subscription to eMusic, so I can buy more mp3's I can keep every month.

I almost forgot. You mentioned the older, DRM purchases that we might have gotten before the Zune Marketplace switched to mp3's. I've already had some issues with that - oddly, just with a few files, but not others. Somewhere on these bulletin boards, you can find my original post about it, from almost a year ago. The short version is this. Microsoft should have records of all your Zune Pass Credits and Purchases. But see if you can document that yourself as well - it couldn't hurt.

Anyway, if those purchased files stop working, contact Microsoft's help desk. Explain the situation to them, that you purchased DRM-WMA's from the early days of Zune, and those files no longer play. If your situation goes anything like mine, they should apologize profusely, and basically offer to compensate you by putting the equivalent monetary amount on your Microsoft account. Then, you can look up all those Black Flag albums in the Groove system, and purchase them all with the money they put into your account. Then you'll have all your old music back, but this time, as DRM-free mp3's.

Also, if these files die, it might help if you look up all these albums on Groove before you contact the Help Desk. Tabulate how much money you'd have to spend to repurchase whatever you lose. If you have a specific dollar amount, then you can make sure that the Help Desk is compensating you with the right amount.

Now, I don't know if this will actually be an issue for you. I still have a lot of old WMA's I purchased that still seem to be okay. But certainly, if the software relies on occasionally verifying the DRM and ownership rights with the Zune Marketplace, and the ZM is now gone, that's a very legitimate worry. The good thing is, you have options if that happens. So as annoyed as I am about Microsoft killing Zune off, I do have to give them credit - they did do the right thing here, at least with me.

Really Microsoft, really? The zune software was an amazing tool for listening and discovering new music and extremely easy to add new music and navigate through unlike iTunes. This is a poor decision. Now I wonder if my music on my Zune HD is gonna eventually die and I have no way to use it anymore since 95% of my collection was from the zune pass. NOT HAPPY!