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Lumia
December 4, 2013

Nokia MixRadio with Play Me: your phone just got psychic



The new Nokia MixRadio has been designed to make it quicker and easier to get to music that you love. Just open the app, hit ‘Play Me’, and it’ll keep you entertained providing your own personal radio station with just one click.

But making things that are simple and do a good job usually involves an enormous amount of complexity in the background.

Play Me is no exception. What happens when you press the button?

It builds on your existing music collection and listening habits with music from the massive Nokia Music library bringing you the music you already love, as well as curating the discovery of new music, without the cost and time you usually associate with doing this.

Knowing me, knowing you

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And every time you interact with the service, it learns a little more about you. If you favourite an artist, download and play a Mix, or if you give a particular track a ‘thumbs-up’, then it learns from that. If you give a ‘thumbs-down’ because it’s playing something you hate, then it also learns to ensure your personal radio station keeps getting better.

Play Me will start with tracks from your favourite artists and then broaden out to allow you to hear more of the music you like. To get the best experience, keep giving thumbs – up and down – to the tracks you hear and add new artists you like to your list of favourites. Maybe remove the ones you’re tired of. The more clues you give to the system, the better job it will do of finding tracks you like.

Let me entertain you

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As the service gets to know you, it will also experiment with the songs it provides to and help broaden your musical horizons. MixRadio is like regular music radio in that it introduces you to new music, but it works from a good idea of what you like and builds on that, without the annoying adverts too.

If you don’t like the track, you simply press the ‘thumbs-down’ button. You can also just hit the ‘Play me’ button again, and it will start again with a new mix, seeded from something else you enjoy.

New to this latest version of the app is the ability to share music (three full tracks of a mix), via social networks, email or SMS. This shares the custom Mix you’re listening to, with the various taste parameters you’ve used to create it, so your friends can listen in, whatever their chosen device or platform.

Here’s an example. Can you guess the three artists I used to create it?