Nokia MixRadio

» see mixradio.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

mixradio is the last piece of nokia's music-services stack. it started life as nokia music on 26 october 2011 at the windows phone lumia launch. free streaming, curated mixes as playlists, offline caching, one tile on the phone's start screen. by the time it rebranded to mixradio in november 2013, nokia had already been sold to microsoft. by the time microsoft finished eating nokia in early 2015, mixradio was a subsidiary microsoft did not want, and line corporation of japan took it off their hands on 17 march 2015. line ran it for a year and then killed it on 21 march 2016.

the finnish nokia i grew up with was the phone. every friend from lise had a 3310 or a 6100-series at some point. i was on nokia phones through the symbian years and my first smartphone was a c6-00. the music side of nokia was more distant. nokia music store had launched back in 2007 in select european markets and it did not reach turkey at the same time as the phones did. by the time mixradio arrived in a form that would run on my phone, the actual music habit was youtube on a laptop and mp3 files copied off usb sticks. streaming radio from a phone speaker was not the thing you did in a country where mobile data was still expensive per megabyte.

the shutdown was quiet. line announced closure on 16 february 2016 and gave users about a month. the app kept booting for a few days after the 21st, then the servers came off. mixradio.com now redirects to nothing. one of nokia's more interesting last shipped products, and one of the shortest-lived music services with a real catalog behind it.

~ the case file ~

~ how it landed ~

mixradio was interesting because it was free. you did not need an account to listen (though one helped for the offline mixes feature). you did not see ads either. the whole thing was subsidized by nokia's phone division as a lumia differentiator. curated mixes had actual editorial behind them: dj-style genre stations plus artist stations that pulled catalog metadata smarter than most competitors. offline caching worked from day one, which was still a paid-tier feature on spotify at the time.

~ the postmortem ~

the death has two causes. spotify became universal in the 2013-2015 window, so any music service without a spotify-scale catalog and social layer was working against gravity. more directly: microsoft did not want mixradio in the mobile stack after the nokia acquisition closed in april 2014. the divestiture to line in march 2015 was a rescue. line had money and a large japanese user base, but streaming music was not part of its actual roadmap; the acquisition looks in retrospect like a favor to a partner rather than a business decision. one year later line's board asked "why do we own this," and the answer was "we shouldn't." shutdown followed.

~ what got buried ~

the free-tier curated-mix model went dark for a couple of years, then spotify's algorithmic daily mix landed in 2016 and covered the same use case at scale. the ios and android apps for mixradio had barely landed before shutdown, which meant a lot of people who signed up in mid-2015 only got about ten months of service before the shutdown notice. the mixradio.com domain has not been reused. the code base did not survive.

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