Cortana has many features and song recognition used to be one of them. You could ask Microsoft’s digital personal assistant to listen to a song and let you know who it was from. That’s no longer going to be possible, though, as the closure of another Microsoft service has resulted in this Cortana feature biting the dust. Cortana can no longer identify songs on demand. This is due to Microsoft’s decision to shut down its Groove Music service.
All Groove Music users were shifted over to Spotify by the end of 2017 and the service was subsequently shut down. As a result of this shutdown, Cortana can no longer recognize individual songs.
The feature worked by pressing the music icon on Cortana’s interface while a song was being played. It would then try to identify the song from Groove’s library and show the relevant result.
However, now that the Groove Music service has been shut down, there’s no library available for Cortana to match the song against. The removal of this feature has been confirmed by John Deakins who is a software engineer on the Cortana team. He confirmed that Cortana music recognition has also been retired due to the shutdown of Groove Music.
Tapping on the icon now brings up a message that says “Song unrecognized,” and it also informs users that the service has been retired. Windows 10 users are left without a song-identifying solution because Shazam bowed out from the Windows platform back in March last year.
Since Shazam is now owned by Apple, it’s unlikely that it would be returning to Windows 10 anytime soon.