Nokia Mix Radio-A new approach to music discovery

Nokia Music service has been quite popular among the Indian consumers considering its easy availability on the mobile phones. Several digital music services have entered the competition while Nokia Music continued to work closely with the music labels and mobile operators of India. Last week, Nokia introduced the Mix Radio service to replace its existing Nokia Music. The Nokia Mix Radio service is available for Windows Phone platform as of now.

In Mumbai, the 5th Nokia Music Connects event was scheduled and luckily we were invited. The event was mostly focused around on how to make digital music better and the business sense around it. However, the most important highlight of the event was the Nokia Mix Radio and the announcement of opening the Music APIs (Application Programming Interface).

Nokia Mix Radio is a digital radio service that allows streaming free songs from artists suggested by the Nokia's music service. At any point of time, if the user does not like the song, there is a skip button to the next song.

Easy Discovery

Nokia Mix Radio basically replaces the Nokia Music app on the Windows Phone platform and the service debuted in 31 countries including India. The Mobile Indian interacted with Jyrki Rosenberg to understand more about the Nokia Mix Radio.

While there are several mobile and web based music streaming-downloading services, Mix Radio remains a special project for Nokia. Rosenberg explained, "Nokia Mix Radio is essential mobile first because the music discovery is very essential on this platform. Users need not access their computers to create the mixes. With the Mix Radio, Nokia offers a very simple and easy to use service to discover new music and artists."

Previously, the Mix Radio was a sub component of the Nokia Music app and by tuning to different channels; the user could stream music for free. Of course, there data charges would occur for streaming music over the data connection. However, the songs streamed were totally free and with an option to download for those with Nokia Music Unlimited subscription.

Mix Radio brings a new logo that looks like a smiley but in fact is an inverted headphone icon. The logo is a subtle way to deliver satisfaction to the Mix Radio users by aiding better music discovery. Mix Radio removes all the frictional navigation steps to start the previous Mix Radio service and make it available to user as quickly as possible.

But will Mix Radio be accessible from other platforms? Rosenberg stated that the Nokia Mix Radio currently supports the Windows platform, Xbox platform and the HTML5 based web platform.