Microsoft’s new Windows 10 Music and Video apps drop Xbox branding, is Xbox Music next?

Microsoft yesterday unveiled a preview of its new Music and Video apps to launch alongside Windows 10; both apps have dropped the Xbox branding, which makes sense given that a huge proportion of Windows users probably never owned the console.

There was a period during which Microsoft truly missed the mark in terms of getting Windows users excited about media - Zune was a particularly catastrophic experiment. Xbox on the other hand was the one brand that succeeded at that, so the tie-up made sense. As users get excited about the potential of cheaper Windows 10 devices though, the company could benefit from streamlining the branding. 

This could also apply to the company’s music offering, Xbox Music. The subscription service is still built-in the current demo release of the Music app, but after years of pushing the service primarily to Xbox users, Microsoft could finally feel confident enough to drop the console name from the service and target all Windows users with a music subscription offering that, as a whole, has worked out a lot of kinks and is good enough to have people sticking around. 

This move would be diametrically opposite to Sony’s, since the company just dropped its own-brand service “Sony Music Unlimited” and launched Playstation Music which is actually powered by Spotify. 

A Spotify representative tweeted yesterday that the company’s partnership with Sony Playstation is off to a great start seeing over 1.5 million installs on the first day of release. 

This shows that console users are interested in having streaming music on their gaming devices, but also that many of them may have already “chosen” a streaming service and may just want to be able to log in through that. 

Still, Microsoft and Sony are in two very different places right now so the alternative approach could make sense.

 

(Andrea Leonelli)