Cortana no longer able to identify songs after Groove Music axing

Microsoft's decision to kill Groove, its music streaming service, has had a rather unexpected repercussion for users of Cortana's song recognition abilities. The digital assistant's ability to identify songs, much like Shazam, is being retired.

The functionality could be employed by pressing the music icon on Cortana's interface while playing some music. Then, the service identifies the song from its library of music (Groove) before bringing you the results. Now that there is no library of music, it would make sense that this feature has been removed.

John Deakins, a software engineer in the Cortana team confirmed the news:

Hi John. What you are seeing is expected. Due to the shutdown of the Groove Music service Cortana music recognition has also been retired.
— Jason Deakins (@JasonDeakins) January 3, 2018

Now, when you tap on the icon, you are greeted with a message stating "Song unrecognized". Below the message, users are informed that "this service is retired", but "music continues".

Unfortunately for users, Shazam is not available on the Windows Store either as the service bailed on the platform back in March 2017. The app is now owned by Microsoft's competitor, Apple. Thus, it is unlikely that the app will return to the former's app store. Windows 10 users are without a music recognition app, which is not ideal, to say the least.

Source: Windows Central