Life has changed quite rapidly for MixRadio: it began as a music service from Nokia (as "Comes With Music"); the company was then sold to Microsoft along with Nokia's handsets and devices business. Bought by messaging app LINE at the turn of 2014, MixRadio is readying itself for life with a messaging application. Mark Wheatley, Head of Experiences at MixRadio spoke with MediaNama about the future for the business, and how, hypothetically, a music and a messaging app could work together. Excerpts from the interview, conducted on the sidelines of the Mobile World Congress a few weeks ago, before MixRadio closed its deal with LINE: MediaNama: Where’s MixRadio at right now? Mark Wheatley: We’re in an interesting place. Within a little more than a year, we've gone from being an innocuous music solution to a Microsoft service, and very soon becoming an independent company. It certainly won't be long before people start to see our aspirations become real, which is really about giving users on other platforms the great experience that Lumia users have had exclusively for the last few years. I think people tend to regard Lumia as a platform where, maybe, the users are less, forward leaning and digitally engaged, but when you look at the performance and usage data, the engagement levels, the retention levels, and the number of active users that we built up, on a platform which maybe still has single figure percentage market share, its quite incredible. MediaNama: The function of that would have…
