Windows 8 was the first Windows to include a Store, along with a pair of new apps: Music and Video. While those apps had some nice features, they were both designed for the hard sell, better suited to being storefronts than media players.

Windows 8.1 shook up the store and included brand new Music and Video apps. Store features weren't gone, but they were no longer the priority.

Windows 10 shakes up the store again. The Music and Video apps have shed the Xbox branding that they used in Windows 8 and are now "Groove Music" and "Movies and TV." If we thought the effort to sell was a little too overwhelming in the Windows 8 apps, the Windows 10 ones swing too far in the other direction.

















The basic form of Groove Music is close to Xbox Music before it. There's been some minor rearrangement—viewing your collection by song/album/artist has been promoted to the left column—but the basic structure and organization is the same. The app is still very much a playback app rather than an all-round music management app, standing in contrast to older software such as Windows Media Player and iTunes. I continue to find this frustrating, because I still occasionally do things such as rip CDs and add bootleg recordings to my collection. A music app that doesn't have a solid Excel-like batch-editable, tabulated view is, for me, a deficient music app.

Groove still doesn't have gapless playback, though I'm assured that it's coming soon.

As with the Windows 8.1 app, Groove can play locally stored music, music stored on OneDrive, and, for subscribers, anything from Microsoft's substantial online catalog. Like the app itself, the subscription has been renamed; what was once Xbox Music Pass is now a Groove Music Pass.









Where Groove diverges from its predecessor is the purchasing experience. If you want to buy songs, you can't do that from within Groove. There are links to buy things; clicking them, however, takes you to the Store app. The Store is no longer used just for app sales; it's now the home of music and video sales, too. When the new Edge browser gets extension support, I believe that they too will be distributed through the Store.

The presentation of music within the store is fine enough. It all seems to work, with the usual options for searching by genre, artist, and so on, but the non-integration with Groove itself is weird and annoying. If I'm playing something in Groove and then preview a song in Store, I'm greeted with the thoroughly unsatisfactory situation of both songs playing at once, because of course, in being separate apps, Store is completely unaware of what Groove is doing. This feels careless.

I don't really understand why music is in the Store, in any case. I can't imagine there's any scenario in which someone is just going to idly browse the Store app not sure if they're after an app, a new game to play, something to listen to, or maybe a film to watch.

This is especially weird given the overlap between the Groove Music Pass and bought music. Some albums include tracks which can't be streamed or bought individually, only listened to as part of a purchased album. It seems logical to me that listeners might want to click the button to say "OK, I'll buy the album so I can listen to the whole thing." The activities to me seem closely related, and so I don't understand why one takes place in Groove, the other in Store.







The video app is very simple and once again makes you switch to the Store to perform purchases and rentals.













One slight peculiarity of the film and TV store is that there appears to be content that you can't actually buy. That It's Always Sunny In Philadelphia Season 0 collection of behind-the-scenes videos was a Zune promotion (you can see the little Zune logo in the main graphic), and as such it seems that it's not actually available to buy through the Movies & TV app. Why on earth it's still listed, I don't know. I don't see tremendous value in showing me things that I can't buy.















The one thing that makes sense in the Store app is buying apps. Frustratingly, the Store has probably been the most unstable part of Windows 10 I've come across. The app itself crashes, and downloading apps and their updates seems inexplicably unreliable. There's also a peculiar visual glitch as shown in the fifth image above; the publisher name is weirdly aligned. I'm sure that will be fixed soon. I fear that making the download and upgrade process reliable may take a little longer.