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This personalized radio app from Japan is like Flipboard, but for music!

Yukari Mitsuhashi Yukari Mitsuhashi
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Japan’s mobile music sector keeps getting more crowded. While RecoChoku, the country’s leading mobile music app, has over one million songs that users can search through, other companies are figuring out alternative ways to deliver music to fans. One such app is a new personalized radio service called Life’s Radio, from Japanese company Sockets. The app plays music according to your mood or situation, and remembers your likes and dislikes. In a way, it is sort of like Flipboard or Zite for music. Life’s Radio leverages a database of over 500,000 songs that the company has built up over the last ten years, with over 1,000 radio channels available. The user interface of the app is very simple. You just turn it on, and you can see options like mood, theme (situation), and purpose 1. Upon choosing mood, you are given selections like ‘romantic’, ‘natural’, ‘upbeat’, and ‘nostalgic’. For theme, there are options like ‘morning’, ‘summer’, ‘driving’, ‘jogging’, or even ‘family’. By tapping on the Seed button, the app will start to play songs that are similar to the one that is currently playing. The app will also play songs reflecting your previous Likes. And tapping on the cart button…

Life'sRadio

Japan’s mobile music sector keeps getting more crowded. While RecoChoku, the country’s leading mobile music app, has over one million songs that users can search through, other companies are figuring out alternative ways to deliver music to fans. One such app is a new personalized radio service called Life’s Radio, from Japanese company Sockets.

The app plays music according to your mood or situation, and remembers your likes and dislikes. In a way, it is sort of like Flipboard or Zite for music. Life’s Radio leverages a database of over 500,000 songs that the company has built up over the last ten years, with over 1,000 radio channels available.

The user interface of the app is very simple. You just turn it on, and you can see options like mood, theme (situation), and purpose 1. Upon choosing mood, you are given selections like ‘romantic’, ‘natural’, ‘upbeat’, and ‘nostalgic’. For theme, there are options like ‘morning’, ‘summer’, ‘driving’, ‘jogging’, or even ‘family’.

By tapping on the Seed button, the app will start to play songs that are similar to the one that is currently playing. The app will also play songs reflecting your previous Likes. And tapping on the cart button will open a web link on Safari, where you’re given options to buy CDs on Amazon, Rakuten, HMV, or on iTunes. A particular song I chose to buy wasn’t available on iTunes but they still showed me the link. So maybe a little more tweaking is needed.

Music labels already on board with Life’s Radio includes Sony Music Entertainment, Victor Entertainment, and Warner Music Japan (as of June 25th). For each song in the database, there are over 2,000 elements such as instruments, tempo, artist’s voice quality, and lyrics. And radio channels are created by mixing and combining songs with similar elements.

The app is available for a monthly fee of 350 yen, both on iOS and Android. To check out how the app works, you can see a video over on Life’s Radio website.

  1. In the app, ‘purpose’ is called ‘Suppli’, probably meaning supplements.↩

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RecoChoku has dominated mobile music in Japan, but will foreign players change that?

Yukari Mitsuhashi Yukari Mitsuhashi
SHARE:

We’ve heard rumors that Swedish music streaming service Spotify is preparing to make its debut in the Japanese market. But so far, there has been no official announcement. Meanwhile here in Japan, the service that’s getting most of the mobile music attention is RecoChoku Best. RecoChoku has operated various music entertainment services since way back in 2001, mainly downloadable ringtones for feature phones. RecoChoku Best was launched in March of this year and provides over one million songs (mostly J-Pop) for mobile users for a monthly fee of 980 yen. With ‘Playing Your Memories’ as its theme concept, the app features songs by popular Japanese artists going as far back as the 1960s. Users can search for a particular song or choose from over 350 existing playlists. For many Japanese people who frequently commute to places by train, the app has a caching feature to save your favorites (up to 1600 songs) so music can be enjoyed even where there is no mobile reception. RecoChoku also has a feature to play a digest of playlist and artists, as well as suggesting related artists, thus allowing users to discover new music. You can also listen to some songs along with lyrics,…

RecoChoku-web

We’ve heard rumors that Swedish music streaming service Spotify is preparing to make its debut in the Japanese market. But so far, there has been no official announcement. Meanwhile here in Japan, the service that’s getting most of the mobile music attention is RecoChoku Best. RecoChoku has operated various music entertainment services since way back in 2001, mainly downloadable ringtones for feature phones.

RecoChoku Best was launched in March of this year and provides over one million songs (mostly J-Pop) for mobile users for a monthly fee of 980 yen. With ‘Playing Your Memories’ as its theme concept, the app features songs by popular Japanese artists going as far back as the 1960s. Users can search for a particular song or choose from over 350 existing playlists.

For many Japanese people who frequently commute to places by train, the app has a caching feature to save your favorites (up to 1600 songs) so music can be enjoyed even where there is no mobile reception. RecoChoku also has a feature to play a digest of playlist and artists, as well as suggesting related artists, thus allowing users to discover new music. You can also listen to some songs along with lyrics, and I’m sure many karaoke fans would find this useful.

In a recent interview with Japanese entertainment portal Urepia, the developers of RecoChoku Best explained a little more about the service:

The difference between foreign music streaming services and RecoChoku is that we provide a context for listening to music. We have years of experince and knowledge about what Japanese people prefer when listening to music. Users can feel familiarity with the playlists that we offer on RecoChoku.

RecoChoku is promoting itself through collaborations with brands such as Coca-Cola Japan. In May, the two companies began a campaign where an exclusive playlist is made availble to the users when by scanning QR codes on coke bottles. Users can win a free trial of RecoChoku for up to 29 days.

There is a 14-day trial period available for anyone who wants to try out RecoChoku on iOS or on Android. The company has plans to release a web version sometime this summer.

RecoChoku recently won an award at MM Soken 2013, an event which aims to accelerate innovation in the tech industry. But while it has excelled in Japan so far, it will be interesting to see if its place in the market changes as foreign competitors begin to sneak in.

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