The Best-Looking Streaming Service Out There: MixRadio Launches A Beautiful New App

Last week, the streaming service MixRadio announced the launch of their app, which is supposed to help them compete in an increasingly-busy industry. The service used to be a part of Microsoft , but last year the giant announced it would spin the music streaming program off into its own company. At that point, the future of MixRadio was uncertain, but it looks like the brand is sticking around, and it has plans to grow its user base thanks to an app that’s easy to use and beautiful to look at.

When you sign up, you start by selecting a few genres you may like. I picked pop, dance, and electronic. From there, it gives you options of artists and groups you may like. Everytime you click one, it makes way for three more names that make similar music. The entire thing becomes a gamified experience, and while I started out only trying to choose a few, I had almost three dozen artists with hearts over their photos by the time I’d finished.

Like Pandora , fast forwarding through a song isn’t possible, and only a certain number of skips are allowed...per mix. If you hit the maximum number of passes in an hour, you can either continue listening to whatever it gives you, or simply hit the back button and try another “mix”, which resets the whole thing.

There are only two other options for listening to music: pre-made mixes, and an option to make your own. The mixes that the company feeds to users span all kinds of music, and one can be found for almost whatever any listener may be looking for. After choosing the thirty-something artists that I liked, it offered me several pop-related playlists, such as “Pop love” and “2015 pop”. From there, the lists branch out a bit, and MixRadio offers everything from Moods (“Turnt up!” and “Commuting”, oddly) to Genres (“Most played hip hop”) to Discovery (“Ones to watch 2015” and “Chosen by: The Prettiots”), and the options continue from there. Making your own mix is similar to the opening page: you just pick the artists you like, and go.

What really separates MixRadio from the hordes of other streaming options is the sleekness of the entire experience. The app is incredibly easy to use, and it looks better than any other program I’ve seen, as the developers and designers collected high quality promotional photos and album art for every song on the system. CEO Jyrki Rosenberg said that when they were creating the app, they wanted to get rid of all the “clutter” that other services had, and they truly cleaned up the entire listening experience...even if you didn’t know it needed a cleaning.

MixRadio is probably best for those who are a bit more passive in their music listening and discovery. The company may boast tens of millions of songs, but finding some less-popular tracks is difficult, so you’re better off just letting the algorithms work their magic and suggest some new tunes and old favorites for you. The aforementioned options are pretty much all the app does, but to be honest, they are likely all you'll need to have a great experience with the app.

You’ll likely start hearing about MixRadio a lot more in the coming months, as they have just recently been acquired by the massively-popular messaging app Line. The details of what is next for the two aren’t yet clear, but if Line ends up using MixRadio as their in-house streaming service, that could make them one of the biggest services in the world overnight, thanks to two hundred million active users around the world.