Nokia has launched MixRadio, a rebranded and altered form of Nokia Music, as part of what it calls an ‘automatic simplified, personalized radio paradigm’. The service comes in two formats, free and subscription, and will be available in 31 countries, with UK, US and European prices set at £/$/€3.99. It already claims to be the leading mobile music service in India, where it has been available all year, and is targeting carmakers as well as handsets as Nokia prepares to offload its cellphones.
That kind of pricing is likely to get it into trouble with the European Commission ‘ give that a euro does not have the same value as a British pound, something that got iTunes into pricing trouble in Europe, but that’s another matter.
The free version comes preinstalled with the option to upgrade on the Lumia handsets, and is available on Windows 8 and the Xbox platform. It provides advertising-free playback, with a limit of six track skips per hour (you can skip a track you don’t like). The subscription service allows users unlimited skips, and the ability to listen to the streamed music offline in up to six mixes or playlists, as opposed to only four offered with the free service. User libraries are not subject to skip restrictions, only the streamed content.
Nokia insists that the app is not your average music player, and it is in fact quietly revolutionary. The company has tried many different approaches in this market. Pre-Windows efforts like Comes With Music prefigured new models that offered alternatives to iTunes, but was poorly executed. But Nokia has continued to enhance its service and, more importantly, the hardware to turn a phone into a full-blown media player. And this time, interestingly, it launched the service initially in India, on its Asha smart featurephone, rather than in Europe on Lumia. This will have given it the opportunity to gain a headstart among users rarely exposed to iTunes, and reflects its increasing concentration on local content and services for high growth emerging markets.
In India, MixRadio has already had half a billion downloads in the past 12 months, making it the leading music service in the country. And Nokia is not just looking for the gaps in the geographical coverage of Apple and Google ‘ it also aims to steal a march in non-phone segments, notably automotive, a strategy it has already followed with maps and will pursue with other web services in future as it builds its media offering post-devices.
In a webcast, Nokia Entertainments VP Jyrki Rosenburg majored on the strong response in India and the high interest from the auto industry, and said there were no plans to bring the premium app to Android or iOS at present.
The service predicts what a user will want to hear, by keeping tabs on their listening habits (and through monitoring the skips, thumbs-ups or and by scanning existing music on devices). MixRadio can apparently play the music its listeners will like, free of charge and without advertisements.
The service lets users discover new artists, a little like Spotify or Pandora, and users can click through to a store to buy music if desired. There is information on gigs, and music news, and users can share their mixes through Facebook, Twitter, email or SMS.
The Windows 8 version allows those who download it a five-day trial of the MixRadio+ experience. Those who already subscribe will enjoy the service on both their Lumia handset and their Windows 8 PC.
MixRadio presents a powerful music player for users, and one that merges the traditional library management style of iTunes with an online service like Pandora. The paid service is significantly cheaper than Spotify Premium, and the complete absence of advertisements in favor of track-skipping restrictions will provide a less enraging experience for those users who choose not pay. Spotify has now launched the free version of its service on mobile devices, but this is supported by inserted adverts every few songs.
Nokia also claims that it is the fastest growing music service in the world, with millions of active users. Nokia cannot release accurate figures, due to the ongoing buyout from Microsoft, although Rosenburg praised the ‘complimentary assets and nature’ that Microsoft and Nokia share, calling it a ‘deep strategic partnership.’ With such strong global user numbers, it seems strange that Nokia have not advertised the service more heavily, given its potential to make a dent in the global music market.
The MixRadio platform has the capability to expand, as connection speeds and handset performance improve, to cater to video content. Streaming music videos is the next logical step in the path, and should video streaming prove possible and popular, then the platform can be adapted to broadcast on-demand video to mobile devices.