LINE

MixRadio: from Nokia to Microsoft to LINE

Messaging giant LINE continuous globalization

MixRadio will complement LINE’s local Japanese LINE Music service

by Gerhard Fasol

In December 2014, LINE and Microsoft announced that LINE will acquire the streaming music service MixRadio from Microsoft.

LINE already operates a Japan-only streaming music service “LINE Music”. Since music licensing is largely country or region specific, with this acquisition, LINE can develop global streaming music services building on existing licenses.

MixRadio

The service was developed as “NOKIA comes with Music” by NOKIA in 2007, a streaming music service which was built into certain NOKIA phones. Over the years, NOKIA also used the product names Nokia Music, Nokia Music Store and OVI Music Store for this streaming music service.

With the acquisition of NOKIA’s handset unit by Microsoft, the company became part of Microsoft, and Microsoft changed the name to “MixRadio”.

The company operates currently in 31 countries, and has a catalogue of about 36 million songs using the MP3 file format without Digital Rights Management (DRM) protection.

Competitors are Spotify and others.

Headquarters are in Bristol, UK, current CEO is Jyrki Rosenberg.

LINE Corporation

LINE Corporation is a Japanese/Korean messaging group, which is also the No. 1 top grossing global iOS and Android app provider.

For detailed discussion, see Japan game market report (398 pages, pdf-file):

Copyright 2015 Eurotechnology Japan KK All Rights Reserved