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How to Enable Music Searches in Cortana on Windows Phone

Music Searches is a Cortana feature which tells you what song is playing around you. Cortana will listen to the song for a few moments and will then present you with the results. Surprisingly she managed to listen, understand and search not only the English songs, but also Indian languages such as Punjabi and Hindi. Don’t find Music Search icon on your phone’s screen? Read below to know how to enable it.

How to Bring Music Search Option in Cortana

If you cannot find the Music Search icon on the welcome screen of Cortana, you are most probably one of those Windows Phone users who are not living in the US, but changed their phone region to US so as to get access to her. While majority of Cortana features work fine by mere changing your region to US, Music Searches require some additional alteration to your account i.e. You need to change your Region in XBOX Music account before you can get access to Cortana’s Music Search capability.

  1. Open the XBOX Live Account Migration page – live.xbox.com/en-IN/AccountMigration
  2. Sign-in to your Microsoft Account if you are not already signed in.
  3. There are certain XBOX Music features which cannot be migrated to another region. So be sure to read and understand them. Click on Next when you are ready to migrate.
  4. Choose United States as the region that you want to migrate to. Click on I Accept
  5. Accept the terms of XBOX Live and click on I Accept.
  6. That’s it. Your account will be migrated to United States.
    xbox region move successful
    Move Successful Confirmation

Searching Music using Cortana

Once you have chosen United States as the region of your XBOX Live account, just shoot up Cortana by tapping the Search Key. Then tap on the Music Search icon towards the top right and point your Phone’s Microphone towards a Music Playback device.

cortana main cortana music search

Cortana will listen to the Music and if she recognizes it, you will be presented with the search results. You can also purchase the track directly from the results.

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  • by mistake I chose the region as not united states now it says I cannot change it as I have changed it already within past three months. I wanted this feature to be enabled on my laptop running windows 10. I am stuck please help.

    thanks

  • For those who have made all the instructions I you can’t see the icon first restart you phone if it doesn’t works try saying to Cortana: Recognize music, the maybe it will say trouble with the connection or I can’t connect to internet you have to try again saying: Recognize music, after that the icon of music will show ( sorry for the English I’m not very good at it xD)

  • Followed ur instructions. migrated my Xbox account to US, but still cortana is not showing the music icon.
    When logged into Xbox account to recheck, it’s saying “xBox Music is not available in your locale”.
    All my language and region settings are selected as US. Plz help..!!!!
    (Using Lumia 625 in India)

  • ^ this works! Confirmed.
    Yo, thanks for the help, bro! 😀
    MAJOR THANKS!
    Especially for the exact links and stuff.