We’ve been following Japanese messaging app Line for some time now with increasing interest: it has 260m registered users, and recently announced plans to move into digital music (Bulletin, 22-Aug-13). Now the company has been talking more about the way it works with music artists, and scotching the suggestions that it’s, well, a Japanese messaging app. “80% of our traffic is from outside Japan. People consider it to be more Asian, but now it’s a different story,” Line exec Sunny Kim tells The Guardian. “We’ve got 17m users in Taiwan, 18m in Thailand, 14m in Indonesia, but now also 15m in Spain, and we expect to have more than 10m users in Mexico and other Latin American countries this year.” Line is also touting its credentials as a fully-fledged social network, with artists and labels able to run profiles and push video and interactivity to fans, not just text messages. Sir Paul McCartney got an official account last week, and he already has more than 270,000 followers. “In Asia, we’re releasing new packages with top singers: a sticker plus MP3 files,” says Kim. “It’s a new format: people can listen to the music on Line, but the exciting part is when they sing the song, they can send a sticker to their friends.”
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